Gunslinger Girl: Occupational Hazards
by RJ Frazer
Summary: A cartel of magnates seeking excitement have refined gangland killing into bloodsport. They call it a cultural touchstone - the Coliseum is at the heart of Rome - but as the bodies pile up and cash changes hands, the Agency takes a different view.
1. Chapter 1

**GUNSLINGER GIRL**

_Occupational Hazards_

_By_

_Robert Frazer_

* * *

"Marriage, in life, is like a duel in the midst of a battle"

-Edmond About

* * *

Simon dreamed. Indeed, all told, he was something of a dreamer. All his life, dreams had welled up through him like a spring of imagination, the fountain that enlivened a planescape as vivid and bright as it was surreal and distorted.

He used to write dream diaries – still kept them in a box, in fact, as they were worth a rueful chuckle from time to time. Melted clocks? Fish vomiting tigers?

Salvador Dali had _nothing_ on that shit.

There had been some cachet in it, for a time. When he was a kid, the class had clustered around him with shining and excited eyes, eager for his latest cartwheeling cavorting caper across the checkers and over the cliffs of exotic, evocative, endless Nod; by the time he reached high school it got him instant admission to George's circle, who in that well-heeled neighbourhood was the only one who knew how to get hold of pot.

His dad hadn't cared much for it – but then, his dad had had difficulty in animating himself for anything. His mother, though – she had seized upon it with glee, poring over his diaries with rapt absorption, seeing her son dressed in the splendid accoutrements of genius, iridescent insight spouting forth from every startled envisioning, the dreams proof of an imagination of such richness and depth that it could never be fettered or restrained.

_The dumb bitch._

She'd pushed him onto creative courses, where his talent could flourish, where the stream could be tapped and released into a fertile flowing river. Like a river, he'd gone along with it, like water moving along the path of least resistance – but after that the analogy had pretty much fallen apart. His writing was, charitably, "modular" – more accurately, a ramshackle and rickety hotch-potch of stock tropes bolted together with all the integrity of a pile of Sticklebrix. He attempted art, but lacked the patience to follow it through. At least with writing a sentence, however trite or dull, was a complete thought – but attaching one line to another scribble only produced a formless patch of worn cloth, good only for tearing apart in frustration with no pattern apparent after an hour of effort. And acting…

…well, the director had said that his technique was _avant-garde_.

Imagination was one thing… expression was quite another.

So, with Simon's overbearing mother having completely squandered her son's youth, worth and career potential in draping an artistic fantasy around her like a fashionable scarf, Simon now made his living by killing people.

Not that the situation proved to be anything so trite and facile as a 'loss of innocence' deadening his soul and infilling his childhood. Just because on a few scattered occasions Simon had depressed a switch which had initiated a chemical reaction that propelled a piece of metal along a lateral course through a warm body that subsequently cooled did not stop him dreaming. He dreamed undimmed, as much and as broadly as he had always done.

Except tonight.

It wasn't that he did not dream, or forgot his dream – his sleep was not skipped time. It was rather that he dreamed _of _nothing, that his sleep was like wakefulness with his eyes closed. There wasn't even the sensation of floating or being adrift in darkness; it was simply a flat wall in front of him.

If Simon had been superstitious or religious (and religion was no more than a socially-acceptable superstition), he probably would have seen this as some portent of impending doom and approached the day a blubbering, snivelling, impotent ruin. Simon had, however, long since dismissed his dreams for what they were – no more than conjurations of brain chemistry, the static of molecules rubbing together building a charge and letting odd neurones spark – and so he was not so encumbered. Indeed, his rational mind was elevated, recognising that his body was turning all of its fuel away from extraneous reactions like causing dreams and instead storing energy for what was to come. It didn't unnerve or undermine him.

It only reinforced the need to win.

Simon's eyelids flicked back and open as he heard the thin squeal of the car trunk's hydraulics swinging up and clear. Jacopo, his agent, had brought in the day.

"_Avete dormito bene?_" Jacopo asked.

"_Ho dormito perfettamente, grazie__"_ Simon sighed his reply, as he sat up and shook the blanket off of him. The back of the car was surprisingly roomy – with the rear seats lowered, one could lie out comfortably and fully. Not unlike a hearse.

Simon winced internally, frustrated at having betrayed his former resolution not to be deterred by unnecessary allusions. He took his attention away from the vehicle he was in to what lay outside – and noticing Jacopo's concerned expression, Simon cracked a grim smile. "Nice of you to care." He said, in English.

Jacopo's face flattened, then he drew back from the boot to stand upright, and scowled fiercely. "I just want to make sure that you put on a good show today." He replied to his client, also in English – but the accent did not mask the hate in his voice. "I've lost a lot of money on you already; I'm not forfeiting _this _commission as well, just because Yankee Doodle Limpdick in front of me can't perform."

"Please, Jacopo!" Simon protested, with not a little sarcasm, as he got out of the car and began to stretch. "It's a new day, can we not foul the air this soon?"

It was indeed a new day, although the day itself had yet to be made aware of that. Around him was supposed to be the rolling hills of Tuscany, but the undulations followed the dense layer of early-morning mist like the creases in a duvet. Feeling anything of the landscape through its cushioning barrier was impossible.

Jacopo preferred profit over poetry, and so he was not inclined to dwell on such artistic allusions. "Just come. They're already waiting for us up at the house." He muttered, slamming the car trunk closed again. Simon shrugged and followed his agents up a stony track. They were passing through a vineyard – stalks of grape vines loomed up through the mist on either side of them, in the dull and diffuse light taking on the characteristic of memorial obelisks and headstones. It was another uncomfortable allusion which preyed on Simon's conscience despite his earlier resolutions, and it was something that he was subjected to for quite a while, as it was a long walk to their destination – the estate must have been quite substantial because it took something like quarter of an hour to arrive at the house.

After hopping up a few stone steps the pathway opened out into a broad, flat square of lawn, whose full extent he could see now that the morning was taking hold and beginning to burn off the mist. The house lay across one edge of the lawn, while the other three sides looked out over the vineyard – the estate owner could cross immediately from his garden to inspect his crop.

The scene was no longer a quiet, close one, though. In the shadow of the house was a large group of perhaps twenty people – no, it was better to call them a _score_, for they were an assembly of aristocratic sorts who would appreciate that little serif-flourish of sophistication. They were both men and women, youthful and elderly, and a few visible foreigners were amongst their number. Mostly they continued to talk quietly amongst themselves, but a few caught Jacopo and Simon's unheralded arrival in their peripheral vision and turned to watch them move on to the lawn. Simon shuddered involuntarily under the attention: the glances weren't curious, they were _appraising._

There was a scattering of other figures on and across the lawn. Mostly tramping around its edges were the broad-shouldered, thick-necked, grim-set types that could be dressed in t-shirts and board shorts, or monocles and tweed jackets, or pantyhose and powdered wigs, and would nonetheless never be mistaken as anything other than _crew_.

Distracted by the guards' motion (and acutely conscious that they would be turning all that broad-shouldered thick-necked grim-set attention on him should he stray off-script at all), Simon didn't notice anyone else at first, but when Jacopo raised his hand in greeting to someone off to one side he noticed Benete, another agent who he had met from time to time – and beside him, his client… and Simon's adversary.

Simon's eyes widened in surprise when he saw who his opponent was. Ryba! There was something – he'd taken markers off of her twice. Once had been in a 'Tag' match. She'd been trying to take advantage of the no-wounding rule in that game type and was shielding her vest with one arm, causing Simon to rip a chunk out of her forearm – fortunately, Simon hadn't lost one of his own markers for that foul because the judges had ruled that Ryba had been deliberately obstructing. The scar was still visible. The second occasion had been during a standard freestyle match – Simon had been aiming for a killshot but missed, bashing a hole out of the wall beside her head instead. It had been enough to scare her into capitulating though – and not a little invective and abuse when she realised who she had surrendered to.

This was problematic – Ryba would certainly be improved a certain degree of clarity when it came to directing her shot in the upcoming standoff, and indeed the wordless black look she shot across the lawn felt like someone painting the tarry stain of a hunter's mark onto him.

There was no opportunity for pre-match pleasantries or offers of sportsmanship, as once Jacopo and Simon's arrival had been properly noted everyone's attention was called by the ringing of a bell.

Stirred by the sound, everyone began to arrange themselves more neatly. The guards arranged themselves regularly along one edge of lawn, opposite the large group of civilians who would be the event's audience. A few more guards rustled off into vineyard to set up a broader perimeter on the off-chance that any trouble would arrive (not that it ever did, but prudence was key to good business). The audience set themselves into a pair of more regular, staggered lines, so that everyone could get an uninterrupted view of Jacopo and Simon, and Benete and Ryba – agent and client, squire and knight, armourer and gladiator, _fratello _– as they stood in the centre of the lawn to receive the Master of Ceremonies.

From a set of patio doors leading onto some decking at the edge of the lawn – hardly the grandest dais, but it still left him raised and clearly in view – came a man. He was approaching middle age, his hair had thinned and he was developing something of a belly, but he had tough, leathery skin which spoke of much time in the outdoors and bright eyes – although high intelligence came across as low cunning when it was combined with his unsettling smile, alternately a dismissive smirk or a predatory grin.

He was dressed in a business suit – and not an especially elaborate and expensive one, either. His clothes were simply plain proper pinstripes, neat but nondescript, that any middle-manager anywhere in any business might be dressed in. Only one detail, almost as minisicule as a single loose thread, betrayed who this conventional character really was. A small ribbon was pinned above his jacket's breast pocket, consisting of three horizontal bars – a central green stripe between two yellow fields, a design which signified the bearer to be a Master of the Order of Merit for Labour, the Italian Republic's knightly order for excellence in commerce and industry. It was a studied vanity – the man had gone to great effort to convey himself as an 'ordinary man' while constantly displaying that he was exceptional. Simon wasn't sure what he hoped to achieve by the display. An attempt to be personable? A reassurance to the gladiators that even the lowly could achieve great distinctions?

Or was it just condescension?

"I am Giorgio." He announced, as if that was introduction enough, before descending down onto the lawn and approaching Simon and Ryba. As he did so, some servants came out of the door carrying chairs for the elderly members of the audience, and Simon took the time to inspect the grand master of these games – in a more intense light now that Simon was closer to death than he'd ever been.

Simon was never quite sure why Giorgio hid his surname. It couldn't be to conceal his identity – anyone with a little patience and the Italian edition of _Who's Who_ would have found his photograph before too long – so maybe he was trying to add some cheap mythic quality to proceedings, or fancy himself with royal styles.

Giorgio looked at Simon and Ryba carefully, his inquisitive expression unfazed by their sullen glowers. His inspection completed, he smiled in a way that suggested satisfaction, and then turned around to address the audience, gesturing expansively.

"My most esteemed patrons – those of our honoured company, and guests from distant climes – may I have the privilege of approaching your fine gathering, and present before you Simon Coe of Burlington, the State of Vermont; and Ryba Sedlacek of Jihlava, the Czech Republic." He motioned an arm towards each of them, before bowing deeply. Jacopo and Benete also bowed; their clients managed nods.

Even if Simon and Ryba were the subjects, this was certainly Giorgio's show. No sooner had the introduction finished than he launched off on a speech.

"We are all privileged people, to have the opportunity to walk on Italian soil." He began. "It can truly be said to be the centre of the human world – both ancient in its history, and international in its scope – from Rome, to the interest of many powers through the medieval period, and now to it bearing the foundation stone of the European Union. Uniquely, it grants this land not only a limitless depth of civilisation, but also one not corrupted by arrogant insularity, and so it may commune with other great cultures." Giorgio nodded to the foreign members of the crowd, whose smiles seemed to say that it was alright to be deemed inferior provided you were gentle with it. His ability to parlay centuries of invasion into benign "interest" also displayed a talented capacity for humbug.

"A corollary of this is that Italy is a prism through which we can perceive progress; the standard by which we can judge our worth as a society. People who dwell here have the gift of perspective. And," now, Giorgio's purple prose was choked off by a sob, "it is a tragedy to say so, but it shows us painful things as well as pleasurable ones. This world is one in decline."

This was the point in the speech where Simon and Ryba were both told to step forward and say together, "That is why we are here."

"And I thank them for it, I truly do." Giorgio continued. "For people like these are key to restoring our sense of worth. Against the venial concerns of the modern day, they are infusing us with a powerful sense of our past, delivered in the most impressive and lasting way."

Giorgio paused for a moment, to let the anticipation build. He blinked. He inhaled. He smiled.

"_The Gladiator Games!" _He threw out his hands in explosive effusion. The spectators clapped and cheered, as though the very concept was phenomenal.

Giorgio's face split open in wide-eyed, genuine delight as he saw the reaction. For a moment he tottered back, as though carried away by the waves bursting out along the lawn, or that he was intoxicated by the heady sound: but then he recovered, steadied and his outstretched arms raised up like a conductor with his cue. He rode the wave; caught it; controlled it; pinched it; lowered it; flattened it; and his hands fell back to his sides in quiet calm.

"We are bringing the world back to Rome," Simon said, "And nothing so facile as merely 'Empire', without distinction. It is the Rome of the Principiate, before the debasement and decline of the Dominate."

"It is not the Rome of the Circus," Ryba added, "but the Rome of the Coliseum, in all its glory and splendour – its marvels of architecture and engineering, its social achievement, its cornerstone of trade and development—"

"—and its little hint of _excitement_, too." Giorgio grinned.

It was clearly scripted, but if anything that only made the audience love it more – watching people kill each other for entertainment wasn't snuff, it was a performance, theatre, opera.

"The two here before us prove that this is a character and a quality which need not be confined here in Italy – an international spirit flourishes, dissolving borders and ethnicities." Giorgio enthused. "And they also prove the elevated nature of our practise. The violence, while it must remain as an edge of threat to spur strong hearts to stern action. Is not an end in and of itself. The sport of the challenge is key, and to that end our gladiators each have a set of _markers_ which they can trade when the battle turns against them, gracefully and decently capitulating. When those markers are exhausted, they may come here.

"To stand before you all.

"To compete.

"To fight.

"To find glory in your gaze, and honour in your memory."

Giorgio held his silence for a moment – a solemn moment of remembrance? For all those now fertilising the vineyard? – and then turned around to address the gladiators themselves. "What paths did you take to lead you down this road?"

"I took a shot in my side during a game three months ago." Ryba said, her eyes locked straight towards the spectators. "The judges of the Gladiator Games paid my hospital bills, and now after three months' convalescence I have returned to have an opportunity to begin reciprocating for their _munificence_." The crowd cooed appreciatively.

Giorgio turned expectantly to Simon. Simon shrugged. "Some guy had me cold, so it was either giving up my last marker, or getting my brain-meats splattered over the wall."

Jacopo immediately seized Simon's arm in a painful, crushing grip. "Are you _trying_ to screw this up?" The agent hissed in a savage whisper. "Are you trying to _scare the life out of me_? Be less damned casual!"

As it happened, though, Simon's show of surly insolence had been interpreted as bluff, breezy, rugged humour, and the gathering laughed at it. Simon took the opportunity to prise his agent's frantically tight grip from his arm. "Stop fretting, Jacopo. You don't want to give me a dead arm just before I have to shoot, do you?"

Jacopo relented, still grumbling, as Giorgio came in for his next segment.

"As well as the thrill of combat, we are here re-establishing the gentlemanly, dignified, elevated practise of the duel – a battle which not only gives the opportunity to find honour, but is inherently an expression of honour, is _required_ by honour," he raised a finger in a demonstrative flourish, enunciating a point. "And honour is the fount of chivalry, which extols the mind and body to bend in harmonious concert to art, to courtesy… and to war."

"What if I don't want to fight?" Ryba piped up. It was definitely scripted – Simon couldn't tell how far the woman bought into Giorgio's exhibition, but at the very least she clearly had no qualms with the principle of the duel itself, as Simon could feel the daggers from her eyes continue to stab into him.

"Then you are merely leaving yourself weaponless against your enemy." Giorgio explained.

There was a moment's expectant silence. Simon grunted as he felt Jacopo's elbow jabbing into his side, and a wordless hiss rasping out of the corner of his mouth.

"What happens if we both wish to resign?" Simon remembered.

"We shoot you both, and we're a bit shorthanded." Giorgio smiled.

A low chuckling murmur rippled out from the assembled spectators, the joke warmly familiar, an easy catchphrase.

"I believe everything is in order then – no time like the present!" Giorgio's light manner was deliberately constructed to relieve the audience after the 'briefing' that had just been given.

A servant emerged from the house, carrying a long but narrow varnished wooden box. Giorgio took the box from him, unlocked it with a small key fished out of his pocket, and opened it before the two 'gladiators' to reveal the tools of their trade. Two identical automatic pistols, each with one single round beside them, lay on a bed of red velvet in the case.

"Choose your weapon." Giorgio intoned.

Simon considered the magnificent, ridiculous, absurd things for a moment, and then took a slow, deliberate stride backwards. Giorgio frowned. Jacopo seized. A rustling shiver of tension seized up the spectators. A few of the scattered guards shifted their feet—

"Ladies first." Simon gestured towards Ryba. Giorgio's smile returned and the crowd shook out its tension in light laughter, everyone enjoying the chivalric suggestion which spoke well of the gladiatorial spirit. Except the gladiators themselves, of course – Simon suspected some sort of double-bluff where whoever chose first would through some psychological suggestion be given a defective weapon for "added excitement", and from the savage scowl Ryba pulled at Simon he could tell that she hated being put on the spot. As if to set herself apart from Simon and show her contempt for his chicanery, she stalked up to the box, yanked out one of the weapons and almost pulled out the velvet when clawing for her round, all with angry, exaggerated movements.

Everyone loved the show.

When Simon had retrieved his own weapon, Giorgio motioned them over to a small white line on the grass. The two gladiators shared one last look – there was no comradely or sporting spirit there, only silent, sullen challenge – and then stood back-to-back on either side of the line. They touched together, but nothing passed between them.

Giorgio stood with the dividing line, legs planted apart, hands clasped behind his back. He tipped his head to the gladiators; to the guards; and to the ground. All was in order.

"Load!" He cried out in a sharp, clear voice.

Ryba and Simon both pulled back the slides of their pistols and slotted their single rounds into their ejector ports.

"Prime!"

The two gladiators pushed forward their slides, and pulled back the hammers.

"Miss Sedlacek, are you ready?"

Ryba bent her arm so that his pistol barrel was pointed at the air, and unclipped her safety catch. "Ready."

"Mr. Coe, are you ready?"

Simon did likewise. "Rah-rah-rah." He chanted ruefully.

"Very well." Giorgio paused for a moment, letting the charge of anticipation crackle for a moment more. Then, he let it burst and arc, for without any further introduction or instruction, he began to call out the paces.

"One!"

Simon took two strides straight forward, away from Ryba.

"Two!"

He did so again.

"Three!"

And a third time.

"Four!"

Simon wondered about all the choices in life that had led him here.

"Five!"

He felt a profound, intense hate for Giorgio, and all the others arrayed behind him, ogling and slavering. The notion of making a game out of death was nauseating.

"Six!"

That hatred was so powerful, though, because it was magnified by self-hatred. Simon knew he couldn't really criticise these people – they had only provided an opportunity for something, and he had volunteered for it. He had chosen everything leading up to this.

"Seven!"

Paradoxically, the fact that he couldn't criticise these men and women became a justification for hatred in and of itself – cruel logic constraining him from something that he wanted to do allowed the loathing to curdle and become toxic, as if his hypocrisy was their fault, for creating the environment in which his own flaws could be exposed in the first place.

"Eight!"

That toxic feeling burnt through something inside of Simon. No-one had coerced him, no-one had forced him before now: so why was he letting himself be led today? Why was he suddenly tugging his forelock, as if beguiled by the lurid am-dram theatrics of Giorgio's self-absorbed show? Why was he walking when Giorgio called out the numbers? Why was he jumping through the hoops?

"Nine!"

Resolution formed inside of Simon. His own choices had led him here: his own choices would just as easily get him out.

"_**Ten!**_"

The crack of a report stung past Simon's cheek, its slipstream slapping against him with a whiplash. For an instant Simon feared that he had been hit after all – but only for that instant. He turned around.

There was no cheering, or clapping, or breaths mustering for a celebratory song – the spectators were leaning forward leeringly, on tenterhooks. Ryba, for her part, was still in her shooting position, half-twisted in a one-handed snap-fire pose, staring stupidly at the smoking muzzle of her pistol.

Maybe the hammer-beat of anxiety built up during the march had shaken her pistol. Maybe Simon's status as an old enemy had clouded her judgement. None of it could excuse that she had blundered embarrassingly. The fundamental error. The beginner's mistake. _The amateur level_. Duels are never about how fast you shoot – only how fast you _aim._

Ryba twitched out of her stance. She stared at Simon with almost bulging eyes, as if fear was stripping her down to animalism. Her jaw worked and ground, trying to form entreaties which were never given voice because she knew that they were futile.

She'd had chances.

She'd had plenty of chances.

And when she had, through her own actions, through no-one's fault except indisputably her own, had squandered those chances, her masters, in their magnanimity, had granted her one more – a fount of support and aid that was undiminished despite all of the indulgences they had patiently granted her before.

Now, that last chance was gone.

Ryba fell onto her knees.

She had had every accommodation.

Ryba put her other hand onto the grip of the spent pistol, as though through sheer will and force of pressure she could crumple it into a second bullet to fire with.

She'd been given a fair crack of the whip.

The barrel was shaking. The pistol grip was shaking. Ryba's hands were shaking. Ryba's shoulders were shaking. Ryba's whole body was crumbling into ruin. It would be a mercy to finish her, merely the blow of the wrecking ball which knocked apart the husk of a decrepit, condemned building.

_She had just tried to kill him._

Do it execution-style.

Simon smiled thinly, levelled his pistol-

-and then turned and pointed it at Giorgio. There was no gloating or glorying, no valedictory speech about the worm turning, no desire to see the one who thought that he was in control crumple and beg and have a taste of the misery he inflicted on his 'wards', only the cold certainty in his hands of the one true thing, beyond rank and wealth, which dictated real power. Time for the big moneyshot—

Simon's hand exploded.

He blinked dumbly at the pumping stump of his wrist for a moment.

Then he only saw the ground rushing up to meet him as a lancing pain doubled him up through his abdomen. Two separate rifle reports blew out each of his eardrums, smashing his head down and grinding it into the dirt as he kowtowed in front of his masters.

Giorgio blinked, and then exhaled, very slowly, gradually and regularly, until his lungs were empty. He turned around to the house, and called out to it. "Thank you, Vincenzo!"

The sniper leaned out of one of the windows. "Not a problem, guv." He tipped his hat in salute.

Simon wasn't quite dead yet. Gutshot, and with his annihilated hand, the distinction may have been an academic one, but nonetheless the last of his life was being extruded from him excruciatingly. He lay curled up foetally on the grass, twitching and spasming, clenching and contracting around himself like a worm pinned down under the hot light of a microscope. He was emitting sounds that were not quite screams, not quite squeals, but strange, juddering, staccato gasps. His one dignity that if the foetid smell beating out from him was indeed because he soiled himself, it was at least concealed by the foul smell of the rancid bile spilling out of his rent gut and ruptured liver.

Frowning at the dying Simon distastefully, Giorgio turned his back on him and left him to suffer, while turning back to the audience who wished to congratulate him on arranging yet another splendid show rich with drama, and his courageously facing down the treasonable scrub of a Yankee dog, whose idiocy surely knew no bounds in the way that he threw away a sure victory in a fit of pique. Ryba for her part simply threw herself down into the grass, prostrating herself in silent submission before Allah, Buddha, Ganesh, Richard Dawkins, Thor, and whatever god may have been listening to her cry for salvation.

After five minutes or so of conservation where he supervised the transferring of bets, reassured a frantic Jacopo that Simon's indecorous activity could not be predicted and would not reflect ill on his integrity as an agent for the Gladiator Games, and politely but firmly quashed protests from some that the books were spoiled because Simon had not fallen in combat with his declared enemy, Giorgio turned back to the house. "Vicenzo," he shouted again, "release our former gladiator over there, would you? I think that he's had sufficient punishment."

"On it!" A faint voice drifted back over to him. A few seconds later, there was another snapping report, and with a thin puff of pink mist Simon shuddered to stillness. Everyone nodded sagely, admiring Giorgio for his mercy, and then brightened again as they realised that the best was yet to come. Now it was the time for the victor's decision! High passions beat about the lawn as earnest discussion set in as to what direction Ryba would choose to travel.

"Miss. Sedlacek?"

The voice of cruel reality pulled Ryba out of her fugue. She did not let herself look up to Giorgio, with all that that would imply – she instead raised herself slowly to her feet, and then tipped her head up. Giorgio was standing directly in front of her, one hand holding a thick manila envelope, while the other was closed into a loose fist, carrying a smaller object. Behind him, a pair of guards were setting up a stretcher to cart away Simon's body – Ryba didn't hate him anymore, suddenly – while a couple of members of the gathering were staring at him with odd, morbid fascination, as though he was some weird creature hauled up from the deep and they were not sure whether some maw would snap shut or tentacle lash out by reflex.

Giorgio pushed forward the hand holding the envelope. "In this hand I have three thousand Euros in cash. A 'golden goodbye', if you will. With that, you can travel anywhere, and set yourself up to enjoy a quiet life. Of course, you _will _enjoy such propitious bounty – the virtue of a peaceful existence is a self-evident good, and I'm sure that you wouldn't want to... _excite _matters through such indecorous actions as, say, discussing your career history with journalists."

Ryba swallowed nervously, and nodded.

"In my other hand, is something else of value." Giorgio was not so much speaking as _announcing_, giving voice in a resonant tone that carried over the field for the benefit of the spectators as much as it was for Ryba herself.

Giorgio relaxed his fingers and showed his palm.

Ryba knew what was coming – she'd read over the procedures of this 'playoff round' a hundred times before. If anything, though, that made what was coming worse. The thought of what was to come had danced in her head, conceptual and formless – and then with one movement it slammed back into tight, confined physicality with staggering force. Resting in Giorgio's opened fist was a small pewter medallion. Not much thicker than a coin, not much wider than an inch, and with no design more nuanced than the image of Enrico De Nicola, the first President of Italy – such that it might easily as dismissed as some cheap commemorative souvenir. Ryba knew different.

"A new marker." Giorgio said, suddenly quiet and personal. He leaned forward, his face deepening with concentration and intensity; the rest of the scene dissolved soundlessly into the early morning mists, and he was pinning his attention exclusively upon Ryba. "An extra life. A pass back into the competition. A fresh credit in the game.

"The choice is yours."

Ryba turned away. Her agent, Benete, watched her impassively. She turned another way. A sentinel line of suited bodyguards marked the perimeter like split-footed obelisks. She tried a third way. The visitors gathered together, an air of expectation stirring up into impatience. On the fourth point, the track leading back to the edge of the vineyard and the cars was unguarded, and clear.

She turned back. "Give me the marker." Ryba growled.

Giorgio smiled warmly, and then bowed his head. "I am your servant." He said humbly – then he flipped the marker like a coin. The little medallion span crazily, hard to spot when it did not glint in the diffuse light – Ryba threw out a hand to catch it, and missed, hearing only a faint pat as it landed in the grass. Grimacing, Ryba went down onto her knees to feel around and find the marker – and then froze with realisation. She turned her head up, from her knees, to see Giorgio standing tall above her.

"_Signora Ryba Sedlacek, benvenuto di nuovo al gioco!_"

Mistress Ryba Sedlacek, welcome back to the game!

* * *

(Continued)


	2. Chapter 2

Agapita automatically swung an arm over to rub the wetness out of her eyes, and then realised that she was awake.

Her pillow was damp again, but that was okay.

At first, this had really vexed her, and Piera had watched with some bemusement as Agapita had fussed and fretted over the unsightly teardrop-stains speckling her pillowcases, all the while railing against her treacherous body. She had gone to her handler Avise and asked him to see if some internal duct had been improperly fitted or a valve was leaking. She'd gotten quite... _aggravated _about it, so tightly wound up over the fear of having something imperfect or inadequate within her, rendering her defective, that she was clenching real tears out of herself – and that had only worsened matters, as the hateful mark of her fault scarred down her face where it couldn't be hidden – she'd been ramming the heels of her hands into her face, trying to press it shut, grind it out, to no avail.

Avise had been the one who saved her. The understatement of his baffled reaction, sitting half-slouched in his office chair with a pen in his hand, had made her think that it wasn't so serious, which his assurance that there was "nothing to worry about, all perfectly natural" helped to confirm. He'd brought her close, put his arm around her shoulders, wiped her face with a handkerchief and blown her nose. He'd grumbled "If you're a cybernetic supersoldier, how you come you've still got all the gloopy bits" as he wiped his hand down, which had made her laugh.

Since then, Agapita had approached it in a different light. Remembering that Piera seemed to have taken it as lightly as Avise did, Agapita chose not to make an issue of Piera's amused grins while her room-mate had been practically tearing her hair out, and instead asked her why she was so nonchalant about the morning tears. It turned out that it was a fairly common phenomenon amongst the cyborgs. That had reassured Agapita – a freakish fault suddenly became a deliberate design. She'd searched for a purpose for the feature, and inspiration seized her during one of her early-morning exercise sessions, when she'd been jogging through the damp grass of the Agency perimeter. The hint of wetness was a gift of the beauty of the world outside and of fresh, fertile promise for a day of opportunities. The cyborgs all had heightened interest in the thoughts of the new girl while she still was establishing herself, and so the idea of the "morning dew" spread widely through the dormitories, enthusiastically adopted for providing confidence and reassurance for what lay in the day ahead, when previously the tears had instilled only doubt and misgiving about what had filled the night preceding. As well as providing a small bit of solace in the cyborgs' troubled lives, the revelation took Agapita's name around the Agency and helped to settle her as one of the girls.

"Oh, uh, we, um, we always meant it like that." Dr. Bianchi had mumbled distractedly when Agapita had asked him about the 'morning dew' during a psych session.

Agapita welcomed it. couldn't think of any gem or jewel which was coloured grey – but for those few brief moments at the start of the day, like a ripple on the lake after a faint scent of wind, the moisture in her eyes was infused with the light streaming from the edges of the curtains, and her whole world shone with the captured brilliance of reflected diamonds.

Then the boundless white reached out into rainbow iridescence – yearning for more, it stretched, tapered, extenuated, and finally evaporated with the musical clef of a wisp – to reveal behind it a note on a sheet of paper, propped up against the crucifix on her bedside table. The writing was dense, small and square – speaking of a hand well-used to keeping comments within the confines of a set box – but, of course, Agapita had no trouble reading it. God help her.

"AGAPITA,

SORRY I CAN'T BE WITH YOU THIS MORNING, BUT YOU'RE A CAPABLE GIRL AND I KNOW YOU'LL DO FINE.

YOUR MORNING ORDERS ARE THE USUAL FOUR-MILE, FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER ROUND ANOTHER MILE AT THE COMBAT RATE. AFTER THAT, SET UP CIRCUIT EXERCISE PATTERN 'B' AND KEEP AT THAT UNTIL 0830. THE TRAYS AREN'T CLEARED UNTIL 0900 SO YOU SHOULD HAVE TIME TO WASH AND GET SOME BREAKFAST. IT'S EDUCATION UNTIL LUNCH, AND I SHOULD REJOIN YOU IN THE AFTERNOON.

REMEMBER TO STRETCH! 8)

AVISE"

What was that word that Avise had used when he'd skinned a knuckle a few days back? _Goddamnit_. That was it. Agapita. rolled it about her tongue thoughtfully. She could appreciate why he used the word – it was one with real strength. A deep guttural base for a pit of loathing, then lashing out at the target with the final aspirated syllable, the asp's sting of venom. You could really get some spite behind it.

_Goddmanit. _

Yeah, it was nice. _Goddamnit. Goddamnit._

"Goddamnit!" Agapita shouted aloud.

"Nnnnneh?" Piera stirred in the other bed.

Agapita blanched in horror and clenched her jaw shut – but of course it was far too late.

Piera rolled in her bed until she was facing Agapita across the room. The two stared at each other from their pillows for a few seconds.

"Agapita."

"Yes, Piera?"

"The clock on my bedside table says that it is half past five in the morning."

"Yes, it does."

"I am awake."

"Yes, you are."

"Even though my alarm is set for eight o'clock, some two and half hours later."

"Yes, it is."

"Your handler has been getting you up at the crack of dawn every day for the past fortnight, and also waking me."

"Yes, he has."

"While that's going on, you usually end up waking Illiria and Kara next door as well as you clatter about assembling kit."

"Yes, I have."

"Your handler is off-site this morning? For the first time in a fortnight?"

"Yes, he is."

"So there is no early supervision, no early alarm, and no early intervention. And yet you still woke me. Early."

"Yes, I did."

A beat passed.

"I'm really sorry, Piera."

Piera rolled back to stare at the ceiling. "I'm sorry too, Agapita. I'm sorry too."

* * *

Jose automatically swung an arm over to rub the wetness out of his eyes, and then realised that he was awake.

He blinked to open the shutters of the new day, but nothing came. They were gummed shut.

Jose smiled lazily at that, his smile spreading out across his face with a broad, languid sweep. It had been ages since the little mucus film of sweep had settled across his eyes like that. It showed a deep sleep, much-needed and well-welcomed.

Something tugged at him. Go away, Sergeant Roe, soldiers don't work on weekends.

He squirmed in the bed, getting comfortable for another doze. The covers were wrapped tightly around him, shielding him from the cold outside. He was nice and warm, snug as a bug in a rug.

Another nip. Sod off, Jean, you can win Granddad's blinkin' race for all I care. Jose couldn't wait for the day their parents finally gave the brothers separate rooms.

Then his alarm clock began ringing, a single, constant tone. _Eeeeeeeeeee..._

Annoying little thing. Jose threw out his arm to put it back into snooze mode. God, he really _was _tired – just that simple an action felt like a laboured effort – his arm felt as though it was moving through something soft and mulchy.

Another sharp, insistent tug. Oh yeah, that was right – he was supposed to be taking Enrica out stargazing tonight. He supposed that he ought to get up.

He could not. He tugged, trying to worm around the folds, but he was stuck fast.

_...eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee..._

There were traitors in the Agency! How else could they have strapped him down in his own bed? His whole department was riddled with subversives! He could trust no-one!

A light blinked on. He couldn't see the beam, but he could feel its heat on his cheeks. He was of sterner stuff than that. He wouldn't crumble under interrogation! Let them come!

Hands roughly manhandled Jose into a sitting position. Wow, this masseur really knew his stuff.

_...EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..._

Nonononono mister dentist please put away your drill I brush every day I promise—

The light became brighter, hotter, rims stinging underneath his eyelids. He tried to blink it away, and with that, his eyes opened.

* * *

"...Jose! Jose! _Please_, Jose! _JOSE!_" Henrietta was shrieking, all composure and deportment lost in frantic panic, and her grip at his shoulder was tightening from insistent shaking to a crushing vice.

"Aggggkk." Jose went, sound being squeezed out of him like a rubber duck in the bath, and tried to turn round in his seat. It was difficult – his neck hurt intensely, and it was like a rusty cog turning without ball-bearings. The most that could be said is that the exercise shifted something in his ears so that the ringing changed from an _eeeeeeee _to an _oooooooo_. Old Macdonald had a farm, eee aye eee aye oh.

Jose laughed at Henrietta, sitting on the backseat of the car with bloodspots on her face and a few pieces of glass caught in her cardigan. As Jose responded, she drew back, and sat very carefully against the back of the car seat.

_That can't be comfortable_, Jose thought, his brains still scrambled from the concussion. _There's glass all over it_.

Henrietta was quiet for a moment, and then her expression hardened. She didn't twist it into a knotted mask of incandescent rage, howling like a banshee's distended maw. She just pursed her lips, and furrowed her eyebrows, as though someone was being just a little light with her and making her ever so slightly annoyed.

Then she kicked the jammed rear door off of its hinges and vanished.

Dumbly Jose cranked his neck back to follow her across the street. Good of Adele to get out of the way and give him an uninterrupted view – he could see straight past the driver's seat and through the gaping hole torn out of the side of the car to get an uninterrupted view of proceedings.

A broad street lay outside, ending in a rough-faced stone wall leading above which was another street on a higher level. The street was crazy with cars which had veered in panic at the explosions, ramming into each other and the walls – one looked a particular mess, its engine block missing as though some passing dragon had taken a bite out of it. People were running pell-mell in every direction, a regular pandemonium worthy of any action movie – the and the special effects matched as one hapless civilian unlucky enough to get Henrietta under his feet had has knees sent sideways. Jose's eye drifted in the direction that his cyborg was travelling, and he saw a man dressed in roadworker's clothes atop the wall, bracing a grenade launcher against the black iron railings of the upper street, and pointing it straight at Jose.

That let Jose get a good look at the weapon and identify it as a M32. He was quite proud of his perspicacity.

Jose heard Henrietta's P90 firing, but the reports sounded distant, less a thundering call to war and more like someone blurting a slobbery raspberry. Jose couldn't help but laugh at that – Henrietta was always so polite and prim and proper, it was nice to know that she had a bit of kid in her too.

Girls beautified everything - the assailant was suddenly surrounded by a blizzard of glitter, bursting out around him as his high-visibility jacket was torn from bullet impacts. He fell back, and as he did so there was a burst of air from the muzzle of his weapon. Jose heard a dull bass _thud _somewhere above him and the roof of the car rattled as though someone had slung a shovel of gravel over it.

Although he had been riddled with bullets and cast down to the ground, their attacker immediately scrambled back up and dashed back out of sight – he must have been wearing an armoured vest, which was alert of him. Henrietta did not check her pace for a moment, leaping atop a car and using its roof to trampoline herself up onto the upper street, spinning above the railings like a . Jose was about to call out in praise, but the cyborg's inhuman acrobatics provoked yells of surprise and astonishment from those few civilians who had hit the deck instead of fleeing, and their sound suddenly slapped Jose awake. Jesus Christ, what the fuck was he still doing floundering around here like some beached trout? Henrietta looked as though she had just gone berserk! He needed to get after her!

Unfortunately, the return of clarity also brought back an awareness of pain. The instant he tried to move, a migraine exploded in his head like a tripped wire. He clenched his eyes shut in an attempt to beat back the concussion, his consciousness trying to compress the pain to the back of his head with appeals to need and urgency, and then creaked them open again, hoping that tentative care wouldn't provoke as much agony.

Not that there was much to see – the windscreen in front of him was crazed with cracks, and whatever panel remained visible was streak with long smears of ragged gore.

He tried to move, but it only caused a dozen daggers to twist in his arms.

Damnit, he needed help. This was what Henrietta was for!

Where was Adele?

His clothes were damp. His face felt sticky. He tried to reach down to take off his seatbelt, and felt a jabbing pain in his arm as something caught on the handbrake. There was a shard of shrapnel poking out of his sleeve, and the funny thing was that it looked just like that rib joint he'd had for dinner on Tuesday. His hand could still flex, so he knew it wasn't his own compound fracture.

_Where the fuck was Adele?_

* * *

Nico collapsed against the alley wall, panting heavily and letting the wet beads of pain bullet down his face. He was sure that he had finally shaken the bitch off and that it was safe to rest, but really it was only something he told himself to stop him feeling lost and panicking when his legs finally wouldn't take any more. He leant heavily against the wall, trying to calm his galloping breath and take in more fulfilling, deep gulps.

Jesus. Jesus fucking _wept_. He'd heard the rumours, of course – who hadn't? – but he'd never seriously entertained them. Even when he'd first seen the girl coming out of the wrecked car his brain had assumed that it was a dwarf assigned her position through some dumb minority-rights legislation – at least it was marginally less ridiculous than a preteen assassin. But it was true! All of it was true!

It had only struck him when he'd tried to shake her off by grabbing a pedestrian to use as a hostage, and she'd simply used the pause in his flight to open fire, raking the two of them without word of warning or shred of compunction. Nico had avoided a bullet to the head but only because the woman he'd hidden behind had been in the way. Nico felt some things sticking to his face and he really, _really _didn't want to look in a mirror right about now.

The most the episode had given Nico was an opportunity to go for his reserve pistol and shoot the weapon out of the evil thing's hands – he'd heard that these things were supposed to be armoured so he wasn't sure what a body shot would do. As it was, the girl had staggered back when her magazine had blown up in her face, allowing Nico to take to his heels again.

Nico felt his side gingerly and emitted a seething hiss as stinging pain lanced into him. His body had been bruised enough by the first fusillade – after that second barrage, even with the additional cushioning of a soft body, he was sure that he'd cracked some ribs. Fucking hell, what a mess. This was supposed to have been just a quick'n'easy side-job for a bit of holiday money, nice and quiet, because he knew that Dominici, his agent, really took a dim view of clients taking on external work outside of the Gladiator Games. Fuck, never mind that, there was supposed to be a big match in Sicily in ten days' time! How was he going to hide this?

"You're slow."

Nico blanched and looked to the source of the sound.

The girl – shit, the _cyborg_ – was at the far end of the alley. Pleated skirt, knee-highs, black pumps, white shirt with a bow-tie, grey cardigan (scorched and tatty) – was that a school uniform? Her headband was missing, and strands of chestnut hair fell down in front of her face – as she brushed them back behind her ears, Nico was shocked to see that past the soot and scratches from the back-blast were running in lines down her face, streaked from moisture. She was _crying_.

"You hurt Jose," she snivelled snottily, "and you made me hurt someone, and that will make Jose unhappy. You're making me like... like _you_! I'm not like you!" She choked on a sob. "I'm _not_! I'm _not_! But you- you- you f... fuuuu..." – her eyes unfocused – "youyouyou flaaaaaa... you _flipping_-"

Part of Nico's mind thought that the cyborg must have assumed that he would have kept running and cut in front to intercept him as he emerged from the alley.

Another part of Nico's mind took advantage of his enemy while she was distracted and shot up his pistol arm to put a bullet straight in the middle of the girl's forehead.

Her head snapped back. Her chin bobbed at Nico for a moment. Her head snapped forward.

She blinked.

He blinked.

She charged.

Nico winced as he fired again, the recoil rippling into his ribcage. Still, his aim was as good as you'd expect in a gladiator with fully ten free-for-all victories – she had tried to jink to one side, but Nico had seen her favouring a leg and smashed another round into the side of her skull. The girl staggered, tripping over the alleyway's cobblestones to crash against a wall, but she immediately thrust off of it and came at him again. She was coming in low, and the damned contraption was small enough anyway – the angle was difficult, but Nico had once fired a killshot through two windows and a banister and so he still pounded her cranium with another round. The girl lost her footing and slipped forward, falling flat on her face – and then she transferred her skidding momentum into a forward roll, leapt up and snapped a hand around Nico's pistol. A second's pressure, and Nico felt his fingers crumpling.

It sounded just like you cracking your knuckles. Funny.

Having your feet swept out from underneath you and some government black-ops robot straddling your chest? Less so.

Nico tried to bat at her, but his hand was just one bright white light. He tried to breathe in the muster the energy to shake her off, but his ribs were screaming and his lungs were fire. The girl raised her first.

Cyborgs were supposed to have super-strength. At least it would be quick.

The fist jabbed down, cracking his cheekbone. Nico yelled in pain, but also in surprise. The second punch, neatly and precisely sending a hairline fracture across his other cheek, filled him with dread – and then as the girl reached down and with one deliberate twist of the wrist yanked his nose out of joint, it became despair.

The girl slammed the heel of her hand against the side of Nico's face, reducing some molars to powder, and then reversed her angle to do the same to the other side.

"_Henrietta!"_ A ragged cry called out.

The girl didn't stop. She gripped Nico's jaw and with a determined wrench tore joints and ligaments free.

"Henrietta! I'm alright! Come out!" The voice sounded further away.

"In a minute, Jose." The girl whispered quietly, gnawing her lip until it bled.

In desperation Nico tried to batter the girl with his free arm. It was a flaccid, flailing movement, and he couldn't have clawed at anything with his ruined hand, but the girl simply grabbed the forearm into a two-handed grip and squeezed as though she was wringing out a damp cloth. Muscle was crushed, and bone splintered. Nico gurgled as his arm was turned into jerky.

Then the girl thrust her thumbs into Nico's mouth, working them into until they were well back. Then she started to stretch, drawing the slack, lolling jaw up into a tight rictus grin, pushing back his lips until he could feel the muscle pulling taut, still stretching, still straining, trying to peel his face apart. Blood beaded up under his nose as his lips began to split—

A man, his face a bloody mask of gore (and not looking 'alright' at all), appeared above the girl.

"Henrietta, please. It's – it's okay. You've done more than enough—"

"_Don't interfere!_" Henrietta shrieked. She whipped around, grabbing Jose's outreaching arm and yanking it away from her.

There was a second's resistance. Then a sense of strain, and then the soft, beguiling sound, almost like the wet slick of lips parting to receive a kiss, of Jose's ulna breaking cleanly.

"...Oh no." Henrietta croaked, and passed out.

Police found all three of them in a pile atop each other.

* * *

(Continued)


	3. Chapter 3

"_...On our foreheads the feathered hat; looking to the mirage of Rome in the distance. Soldiers, Bersaglieri of Italy, she sings the hymn of your fierce valour! She sings the hymn of your regiment that is precious to the Madonna, a history so proud that men cheer it from the grave! Oh Italy, in peace or war, should the Nation call to us, we sing proud and true sacred names of heroic virtue…"_

Avise burbled the song happily to himself, humming and murmuring a tune as he queued in the refectory for dinner. He was radiating good humour, and a few people in the queue around him even started bobbing their heads to their own personal theme tunes as he passed.

Once he had collected his meal Avise scanned the refectory tables. Not being antisocial but appreciating his personal space – something that you didn't get all that much of in the Army – he steered towards the table with the fewest occupants, the only other diners being Alessandro (his meal finished and his head invisible behind a broadsheet edition of _La Repubblica_) and his cyborg Petrushka, who was still eating and working through her plate quietly and sedulously.

"Bit late in the day for the news, isn't it?" Avise wondered as he sat down.

"Always read the paper cover to cover," Petrushka said knowledgeably, lifting up her fork to enunciate a point "you may as well get your money's worth."

"No arguments there." Avise agreed, although privately he wondered whether he was agreeing with Petrushka or Alessandro.

"Nice night, last night?" Alessandro murmured from behind the newspaper.

"Yeah, went pretty well, thanks." Avise began tucking into his meal, not thinking Alessandro's interest as anything more than a conversational token of politeness.

"How was she, any good?"

Avise choked on a half-swallowed bite and collapsed into a hacking fit to dislodge it, attracting a few curious and concerned glances from other tables. Alessandro's expression was unreadable behind the newspaper, but the corners of the pages rustled in what may have been a sly chuckle. Petrushka hid a smile behind a sip of her drink.

"I, uh, I, er, I, ah, only went out for the air…"

With a crackle of newsprint Alessandro flapped down the upper fold of his newspaper to reveal his face. He tipped his head to one side and stared at Avise pityingly. "_Please_, Mancini, have some dignity. That's 'dog ate my homework' level. You didn't even roll in until gone noon, _and _you've been swanking about the compound all afternoon like the cat that's got the cream. If _you_ were out visiting your sick mother, _I'm_ the Emperor of China."

Drawing back in horror from Alessandro's uninhibited frankness, Avise threw an imploring gesture to Petrushka, hoping that feminine sensibility would rescue the table from tawdriness.

Petrushka did adopt a sensible manner, although Avise was dismayed when it went against the direction that he'd have hoped. "Oh dear oh dear, Mr. Mancini… what would Agapita think, I wonder?" She tutted and shook her head with slow solemnity, although her voice had a teasing tone.

That gave Avise pause, so much so that he forgot the really insubordinate attitude that the cyborg was exhibiting. What _would _Agapita think?

"…she's not my wife." Avise mumbled lamely as he slumped down into his seat, trying to convince himself as much as answer the other two. He glanced over to Alessandro and Petrushka to see them both matching each other with eager, sly grins.

"Damn your impudence, you damned _conspirators_!" Avise snapped, heat flooding to his face as he felt acutely that he'd been made a fool of. He tried to disdain the other two by attacking his dinner plate and ripping up some mouthfuls, chewing each bite noisily. Despite his deliberate focus on his meal, though, he still glanced across to see what new snare that the two trappers were laying. They had their heads together in close, whispered confidence, as thick as thieves. Alessandro was some fifteen years younger than Avise, a whole generation apart, and he knew that he and his cyborg had positioned themselves for that little rendezvous precisely so that they could mock the older man for his private approach to... personal matters: but as he watched them talk he couldn't help but feel beguiled by their easy, familiar relations. Over the months he had seen that every fratello, young or old (and indeed his own, a warm sense of pride blooming briefly in his breast), had a definite sense of hierarchy, but Alessandro and Petrushka were different, tangibly _partners_. It was with some wonderment that he took in their fluid, smooth interaction, marvelling their clarity as one coherent unit…

…Avise stopped himself. The fact that he was boning her might have had something to do with it.

Petrushka finished her meal and laid down her cutlery neatly on the plate. As she did so, Alessandro laid a hand on her arm. "Petra, head back to the office and take the Bubastis file down to the wardrobe for us to have a look over, will you? We still need to sort out costumes for that job."

"Sure, 'Sandro." Petrushka smiled easily. She knocked back the last of her drink in one swig, and as she tipped her head her eyes settled on Avise. At her angle her gaze looked like thin predatory slits. After she gathered up her tray, she sashayed over to Avise's seat. "Hey, soldier-boy." She said in a sultry tone.

"Uh?" Avise grunted, not expecting the attention.

Petrushka smiled and leaned towards Avise, who was momentarily at a loss, not quite sure of what to make of her interest. It allowed the cyborg to come in close, and she began to whisper quietly, gently, softly, soothingly into the curve of Avise's earlobe. The handler was still for a moment. Then his eyes widened. Then the colour blanched out of his face. Then he convulsed as though someone had run a charge up his seat.

Pleased with her adept handiwork, Petrushka straightened up, and giving Alessandro one final smile, she walked off to put away her tray and crockery while Avise loosened his collar and sweated a little.

"Poetry. Sheer poetry." Alessandro laughed. "She can play you like a Stradivarius."

"She has a very good teacher, I'm sure." Avise harrumphed, trying to gather himself and restore his dignity.

"True, that." Alessandro nodded lightly, passing over anything that might have been implicit in Avise's remark. "Anyway, seriously, how did last night go?" Alessandro persisted.

"_Not _while I'm eating my dinner, Ricci." Avise sighed wearily. "You're putting me off my food."

For the first time Alessandro frowned. "Look, Mancini, I've tried to be delicate—"

"Huh!" Avise snorted contemptuously.

"-and I wanted to _avoid _mentioning this detail now," Alessandro carried on patiently, as though he was condescending to solve a difficult problem for a child, "but the fact is, I was _told_ to check up on you."

Avise looked at Alessandro strangely. "So, what, you're the Section Two snitch, then?"

"_That was uncalled for, Mancini_." Alessandro's face suddenly snapped into pinched fury and he rasped in a savage whisper that carried no further than Avise and the table edge, but only made its force even more concentrated in a single pair of ears.

Indeed it was, far overreaching, Avise thought guiltily, immediately chagrined. "Yeah. Sorry." He mumbled, chastened.

"That's okay, I know people say things without thinking sometimes, we'll say no more of it." Alessandro allowed magnanimously. "And I'm sorry too, Mancini, I can appreciate that it's a private subject, but I wouldn't insist if I didn't have to."

Avise looked around for a moment. He could hardly refuse Alessandro's request now, but he still found the conversation absurd and distasteful and needed time to muster the will to speak. "How it goes for most people, I imagine." He began, trying not to make a big deal of things. "I drove down to Ostia, booked into my hotel, went to a bar on the waterfront. Bought a drink, looked around for a while, caught a pretty girl's eye, offered her one."

"How old was she?" Alessandro interrupted.

Avise started, unsure whether Alessandro was implying something. Seeing no guile in his expression, he answered. "Twenty-seven, she said. Looked it as well." He added hurriedly.

Alessandro grunted. "Not quite _too _old for bar pick-ups... never mind me, carry on."

Avise continued. "We shared a few rounds, and talked most of the evening. She had a few friends with her who were going on somewhere else, she waved them on."

Alessandro tapped his teeth with a fingernail thoughtfully. "Talking. Did any politics come up?"

Avise had to think hard. It had been an enjoyable time, everything sinking gently into a warm, muggy fug of happiness like a yielding feather bed, and that dulled recollection. "Not really. She said she lived in Rome city, and I mentioned that it must be difficult getting about with all the traffic blockades nowadays, and she said she didn't want to dwell on dreadful details, or something like that."

"Alright. Next." Alessandro tapped his teeth again, as if he was scratching shorthand on the enamel.

"Well, after a while, particularly after she let her friends go on, I felt that we were warming up to each other, so I asked her if she wanted to spend the night with me. She said yes, we went to the hotel and" – Avise swallowed, still not comfortable with mentioning private matters aloud, and he had to allude to it obliquely – "did the sorts of things that couples do." Avise paused for a moment, expecting Alessandro to make some smart-alec wisecrack about picking out drapes for the kitchen, and was surprised when the younger man remained quiet and attentive. Avise gathered his momentum back and carried on.

"In the morning, we had a bit of a kiss and a cuddle, so I think that she was happy." Despite his stern reticence over the subject matter a hint of Avise's boastful nature peeked up momentarily over the wall of propriety and decorum he'd built around himself. "We then went down for a late breakfast together in the hotel restaurant. We didn't exchange numbers – I think that she was expecting me to take the lead, and when I didn't, for obvious reasons" – Avise gestured to the refectory and Agency surrounding him – "she didn't bring it up. We said our goodbyes, she headed off back to her friends' hotel, I drove back to the Agency well in time for the afternoon training session."

Alessandro searched Avise's face for a few seconds. Seeing no recognition or realisation of fault there, Alessandro's own face fell and he put his hand to his brow. "Oh, _Mancini_, what have you gone and _done_?"

"I don't understand."

Alessandro leaned back in his chair and remonstrated with the ceiling. "Time after time I tell them to put this in the orientation package, but they just don't get it. I can only say that the Chief must be as uptight as youare, Mancini, or else that he's taking the feud with Chief Draghi so far that he has to ignore what was Elementary 101 back in Section One, just to be contrary."

Alessandro leaned forward again and fixed Avise with a stern, admonishing gaze. "Mancini, what you indulged in last night may have been a genial understanding between mature adults seeking mutual emotional support... or, more likely, you were picked over by a Padanian reconnaissance operative seeking intelligence on Agency, or at least Government, activities." Alessandro shook his head sadly. "'Caught your eye'? She may have just as easily made herself available."

Avise's mouth was agape. He didn't quite know what to make of Alessandro's interpretation of events, not least because he imagined that he was attractive enough on his own merits.

"But I wasn't carrying anything compromising." Avise protested. "I booked the hotel in advance so I only had cash. I checked out a blank phone with the quartermaster and my I.D. card was one of the gate-cleared fakes, too." Avise fished it out of a pocket to show to Alessandro. It told the younger man that Avise was a regional manager for 'Associated Aggregates Inc.'

_Jesus, it might as well have read 'International Export'. _Alessandro winced. "Well, that helps damage control, and your mentioning that she went for a second round rather than just banging it out and being done with it having achieved her objective" – Avise blushed at Alessandro's crudely direct manner – "is a little encouraging, too. You just might have dodged a bullet, _this _time. But don't take it for granted. You were lucky you weren't targeted by a Black Widow unit. Trust me, being smothered at four A.M. is _not_ kinky."

"That sort of stuff actually happens?" Avise was incredulous.

"It happens more often than laser satellites and tables of gold, at any rate. Or cyborg kill-bots, for that matter." Alessandro laughed mirthlessly, and rubbed his neck unconsciously.

"Well, what do I do to minimise the risk of, uh, exposure then?" Avise asked in consternation.

"I suggest a brisk jog, a cold shower, and a lie down in a dark room." Alessandro shrugged. "You have to exercise some restraint."

_Easy for you to say_, the thought skulked sullenly in the corner of Avise's mind, although after his earlier chastisement he didn't give voice to it.

As Avise was silent for a few seconds, Alessandro took it to mean that frustration was stopping him up, and so he continued. "Mancini, I'm sorry if you find it limiting, but this sort of gig doesn't really lend itself to intimacy. That is a matter of personal relations, and we live by deception in all things. Closeness and distance – it's an inherent contradiction, and it just can't be sustained." Alessandro glanced to one side, distracted, his brow furrowing. Noticing that Avise was beginning to show interest in his suddenly troubled expression, Alessandro coughed and hurriedly fielded the ball back across the table. "And really, prioritising getting your end away is really unprofessional." It was a clumsy, messy backswipe of a return stroke, but it had the desired effect.

"Look," Avise said a little hotly, smarting under the criticism, "I don't like this implication that I'm some layabout. Between Iraq, and Agency training _straight after_ that, I haven't had an opportunity to… to _go out_ for fully a year. Is it that unreasonable for me to have a bit of leisure?"

"Hey, you don't have to apologise to me." Alessandro said coolly, his confidence returning as he regained control of the conversation. His tone only infuriated Avise further; the older man was becoming hopelessly entangled in the embarrassment of getting so thoroughly bemired in such an impolite subject. Alessandro administered the _coup de grace_. "But if you absolutely can't douse the heat... just use a prostitute."

Avise went as white – his blood drained from his face as though he'd been transfixed by a lance and it was spurting from the wound. "What?" He croaked.

"Oh yes, it's very secure," Alessandro shrugged nonchalantly, as though all the minutiae was really very boring and tiresome, "we can monitor their activities a lot easier – someone only taking on government clients for dance and conversation naturally sets the alarm bells ringing. Better yet," Alessandro drawled, "it's best to shop around to avoid establishing obvious patterns. It's like a kid at a pick'n'mix stall, go nuts."

"That..." Avise splashed, floundered, bubbled, drowned, sunk. "...doesn't sound right."

"What are you being so prudish for?" Alessandro wondered. "Jesus hung out with prostitutes all the time. Look at Mary Magdelene, and isn't she the 'apostle of apostles'?"

"I don't think that He slept with them, though." Avise grunted.

_God, that's so adorable! _Alessandro smiled inwardly.

Something was preying on Avise's mind. Alessandro kept quiet, letting Avise come in his own time.

"Do you, uh..." Avise leaned close in to Alessandro. "Do you know any?"

Alessandro nodded, and with a level expression began scratching some phone numbers onto a notepad from his pocket. It gave him a few seconds to reflect on the character of the man that he's just interrogated. A curious and contradictory fellow, this Avise Mancini. Elio Alboreto had let slip once, when he was a little spaced-out (Alessandro meanwhile had only sipped lightly at the joint, enough to make people think that he was game and drop their guard but not enough to make the attention-clouding fog impermeable), that Avise had once waxed lyrical to him about his earliest conquests, and certainly had had no inhibition about politeness or decorum. Today, however, was a complete contrast, and he'd stammered through most of the conversation like a nun scandalised by an exposed ankle. It seemed that Avise preferred to open up to people only on his own terms – assaulting from a position of strength when all proper logistics had been marshalled – and was ill-equipped to cope with someone approaching him instead, before he'd properly manned the ramparts.

As Avise guiltily snuck away Alessandro's paper into a pocket, Alessandro nodded to himself. He was getting to like Avise – the man was interesting.

* * *

The lengthening summer allowed people to enjoy the caress of daylight – it also made evening training after dinnertime viable. Agapita was tempted to be annoyed when Avise said that he arranged a mortar practise – she had been working all morning already, after all – but on seeing her handler the resentment died and was replaced by concern. She could tell that he felt distracted and put out himself, and hoped that some time out would help him sort out his feelings.

With her mortar on her back and two cases of training bombs in her arms (carried as easily as a stack of books from the library), she had mounted a Fiat van with Avise and the support agents Amadeo and Giorgio. As they were loading up, Priscilla had jogged up and asked to tag along – she mentioned that she had missed a recent exercise session and that helping to retrieve and carry fired bombs would make up for it, although from her glances Avise could surmise that she was really more interested in getting to know the new arrival in the cyborg dorms. Avise was happy to have her along in any case.

The group thusly gathered had driven out to an unused sector of the training area, Priscilla offering Agapita fashion tips along the way and chiding Avise for his lack of sartorial sense, while Giorgio and Amadeo argued about some lower-league soccer, which signalled them as true fans rather than fair-weather groupies who just followed the big teams. There was an Air Force detachment practising field camp construction in the training area as well, but they were keeping to their own sectors and there was no danger of them straying into the fratello's location. Avise, Agapita and their cargo were deposited at the edge of some open ground. As Amadeo, Giorgio and Priscilla carried on in the van to their own positions for the exercise, and Agapita unpacked and set up her mortar, Avise surveyed the ground over which she was to fire. It was a field of long, ripe grass, walled at its far boundary by the treeline of a dense covert. Scattered across the field were a number of simple, boxy wooden huts with plain unadorned walls and flat roofs – targets that Allison had been required to build as a menial punishment when she'd loosened her handler Brian's car's suspension to the point that he'd banged his head on the ceiling half a dozen times when driving down a street with sleeping policemen. As if to deliberately ram home the punitive pointlessness of the exercise to Allison, Agapita was now going to bash holes in them.

"Ready, Agapita?" Avise reached down and gave his cyborg's shoulder a squeeze.

Agapita had been ready pretty much immediately, having set down the mortar so instinctively it was like putting down a box, pulling the tag and it springing out pre-assembled. While Avise had been considering the lay of the land, she'd been occupying herself by building her bombs into little pyramids. At Avise's contact, Agapita tipped her head to one side so that her cheek rested on her handler's knuckles – although it went upright again when Avise, not expecting the touch, instinctively jolted.

"Yes, sir!" Agapita cried out brightly, apparently unfazed by the jerking separation. She squinted briefly at the field and its peppering of plywood pillboxes, then plucked a bomb off of the highest peak of her little Giza with one hand while she adjusted the mortar's settings with the other.

_DHOO!_

A second's bated expectation, and then a small black hole flicked open on the roof of the nearest hut. Avise made a check mark on his clipboard, Agapita smiled in satisfaction at a correct delivery – and then they both almost jumped out of their skins when with a whiplash crack, the roof slats of the hut burst upwards. Planks of wood snapped into the air, wobbled almost gracefully at the crests of their arcs, like ballerinas with fluttering hands and feet, and then thudded down into the grass around the hut, in a broad circle, while floating splinters span in the air like a lingering cloud of chaff.

Avise and Agapita turned to look at each other questioningly.

"Oh...kay, move on to the next one."

_DHOO!_

Agapita plumbed another neatly geometric vertical strike through the roof of the next-nearest hut. They both waited for a moment – feeling vaguely stupid for expecting anything – and so were taken aback again when all four walls of the hut thrust themselves apart, while the holed roof sprung up into the air a good eight feet.

Avise arched his eyebrows, while Agapita surveyed the mortar critically, trying to find evidence of tampering.

"Well then... let's see what's behind door number three." Avise mused, directing Agapita to the third and final hut.

_DHOO!_

This time they were prepared for it. Agapita gave a tight, fierce smile, shaking her fist a little when she scored another direct hit. Whatever superficial show someone had set to strut their stuff with, she was sure that her own skill had not been swayed. The show, when it came, proved to be a fairly substantial one, though. The walls of this particular hut were formed from narrow vertical planks and, one by one, they all fell outwards, balanced to do so at regular intervals of steady progression, absorbing the fratello's attention for a good minute. This left the roof supported on four thin legs – the corners of the hut – which, after a moment's trembling, kinked in half and then folded outwards, like some bandy-legged quadruped settling down – with the hole in the roof lowering down neatly over Agapita's mortar-bomb, stuck upright in the earth – so turning even her action into part of the show.

Avise smiled indulgently at the sight. He could see what had happened now. It hadn't been an effect of Agapita's weapon – precision, rather than effect, was the objective of the exercise and so she was firing dud rounds to note their landing points rather than their blast areas. He could guess that Allison, having decided to enliven a dreary punishment detail with her own inimitable brand of over-engineering, had placed some roof supports under stress to shatter with that impressive elastic effect when damaged by the mortar in the first hut, and had designed similarly staged destruction for the other two. He glanced down at Agapita, who had evidently come to the same conclusion that he had done, but saw it in a different light. Indeed, she was actually scowling fiercely, a complete opposite of Avise's own mood, resenting the intrusion of another cyborg into her private time with her handler.

Avise felt a surge of compassion rise up through him when he saw Agapita's sour look. He was surprised to see that Agapita could actually exhibit such ill-feeling, and somewhat disappointed that her character was not so unblemished that it did so; he also felt that Allison's work was impressive and warranted appreciation for the ability even if not the intent – to reject it felt petty. Stronger than all those sentiments, however, was the affection that came from seeing her honest, unguarded and unvarnished thought, Agapita as she was without being muzzled by politeness or protocol, and the pleasure at seeing her genuinely feeling – and the warm sense of worth and belonging when that feeling included him.

"Calling unit Cernaia and unit Fagare, calling Cernaia and Fagare. This is unit Andreani. Prepare your grounds for phase two firing. Respond when ready. Out." Avise spoke into his walkie-talkie. Agapita breathed a sigh of relief, and so did Avise on hearing it – he didn't want Agapita to sink into a glum attitude and so had abandoned a second round of shooting at the huts to move up to the longer ranges. He passed the walkie-talkie over to Agapita so that she could communicate with her 'spotters' Giorgio and Amadeo, who were laying out targets in two separate fields beyond the trees (with jobs like these, the fractious pair could still be _reported_ to be happily working together even if they stayed physically apart). He felt a quick tremble run through Agapita's fingers as they brushed his hand, although it didn't seem to interrupt her actions in any way as she began rattling through the various battle-codes with "unit Cernaia". Avise flexed his fingers distractedly, only half-listening to his cyborg. The great dossier had said that Mimi Machiavelli had been a very touchy-feely character. Just how much of Agapita's sensitivity was the residue clinging to the bottom of her washed-out head, and how much was Agapita's new self establishing itself and putting down roots in the world around her? And what did Avise think of himself when he had the hope that Agapita was being animated and enthused by him?

_DHOO!_

The concussive report of the mortar jerked Avise out of his reverie. As Agapita reopened fire, what remained of her ill-temper from Allison's demonstration seeped away as she slipped back into routine, and an opportunity to demonstrate her own skill without distraction. It was impressive to see the oiled efficiency with which she worked – indeed, the pattern was almost hypnotic. While Avise had seen mortar crews squabbling over calculation tables in the past, Agapita worked with ambidextrous skill and computational speed, simultaneously adjusting bearings, glancing at her map, and selecting another bomb to load as soon as the walkie-talkie read out co-ordinates to her without a second's hesitation. Avise had been told that this ability had been deliberately engineered into her during conditioning to fill out a fire-support gap in the cyborgs' formation fighting, but even so he could not help but admire it as though it was a prodigal talent.

After Agapita had exhausted her ammunition, Avise took back the walkie-talkie for the two support agents' reports on her performance. The calculation of the conditioned cyborg mind was readily apparent – here accuracy was extremely high, with only a handful of straying shots betraying that maybe Agapita could maybe wait a second or two to let the equations settle in her head. Still, it was little to complain about and Agapita positively glowed when Avise remarked favourably about her strong performance. That itself pleased Avise – Agapita may have aimed like a computer, but it would have been dispiriting if she thought like one as well.

The support agents must have rolled up their fields as they worked, taking up targets and bombs as they reported the hits in, because it didn't take much time for the Fiat to arrive back at the fratello's looked into the back seats of the van while Agapita deposited her own kit in it, but with a decision stepped back from it. "It's alright, you two go on. It's a nice evening, we'll walk home."

Priscilla seemed a little disappointed, while Giorgio looked over to Amadeo – Amadeo shrugged. "Okay, see you back at the ranch." He said in farewell, and drove off.

It was about a mile and half back to the compound: a pleasant amble to round off the evening. The metalled road was in decline, crumbling away at the edges, but that allowed shoots to push through. The verges were dense, choked, entangled with weeds and nettles – but that also meant that they were heady with scent, rich with colour, and buzzing with life. The sun felt warm on his face, but the evening air itself was mild and did not prickle him.

It was one of those truths which lifted the soldier above the herd. Whenever you saw war on the television or on the bookstand it was always fixating on gutted-out buildings or the bombs dropping from aircraft when the ground was no more than an indistinct splurge of muted tones a mile below. In all his time with the Army, though all his crawling through snow, bivouacking under rain, clambering up mountains boiling up coffee on the undergrowth, wading in rivers, kicking over sand - and walking down a road in the evening summer with a bright, eager girl beside him - he had been immersed in nature more than the most enthusiastic rambler could ever dream of.

As if to affirm that he was here and that all this was his, Avise struck up a cigarette and took a possessive breath into himself. Who could ever give this up? Who could ever _pass_ it up? He'd seen anti-war protestors before – even been harangued by a few, once Iraq had started up. He'd seen although their twisted anger, their split, screaming faces, their stamping, wound-up, knotted, clenching rage, their tantrum roars, their fleckspittle scratching at his own face like gravel... and on the other hand he felt that he had to come here, breathe in, and sigh out. This was a good life, a better life than their limited minds could ever conceive.

Avise turned his head to Agapita, and gave her a smile. Agapita didn't see it immediately, as her head was roving about her, taking in all that she could see. Agapita knew about plants, trees, insects and seasons, but it sat in her head as dry information, close-packed lines of text without illustration, something to quote but not understand. She could perceive everything – her young cyborg mind had not yet quite perfected the art of tuning and concentration, and her heightened senses flooded her with information surging from sensitive ears, high-resolution eyes and alert hairs, from the crisp edge of grass blades to the thrumming wing-beat of bees and the texture of the tarmac through the sole of her shoe. Despite the rush of information, though, Agapita was not overwhelmed by or drowned in it – it all sunk into her, replenishing a mental groundwater parched by the remoulding fires of conversion and conditioning, enriching knowledge with experience. There was a deep reservoir to fill, and Agapita drank it all eagerly.

Her gaze took her over to her handler, and once she saw him she immediately smiled herself, and held her head there. There was the flood, and then there was the surge beyond that – Avise loomed large, filling every part of her head, a wonder of detail pooling as it flowed faster than the hungry folds in her brain could be filled. She was absorbed. The burrs on his jacket (no wasting on a futile enterprise – what he was involved in was worthwhile), the regular and even comb of his hair (neat, not showy), the veins and bones of his hand (strength and industry), the amber bead of his glowing cigarette (a scintillating jewel) - and the warmth in his eyes, and the curve in his smile.

On a sudden impulse, Avise threw am arm out and wrapped it around Agapita, pulling her close in to him. They stumbled forward together a few steps, and Agapita breathed deeply, melting Avise's jacket into herself. She loved the smell of Avise's cigarettes. The acrid tang, sharp and alert, sparked across her nostrils, making them twitch – stimulated with vigour and energy. The smell fused with Avise's own musk, to become a reactive mix, charged with chemical potential – it felt... electric.

"Can I have one?" She murmured absently, as the two drifted back apart again.

"What, a cigarette? You should never smoke!" Avise said suddenly, and a little sharply. "It's a filthy and disgusting habit, and nothing good comes from it."

Agapita blinked, surprised by her handler's vehemence and shaken out of her dreamy fug. "But, sir," she protested, a little confused, "you smoke. You're smoking now."

Avise was silent for a few seconds. He took another couple of puffs. "Privileges of rank." He said eventually.

They continued on in silence for a short time while Avise finished his cigarette. Once he had pressed the stub into his little lozenge-tin ashtray he seemed keen to move on to another topic. "Speaking of mouths and the things we put in them: have you put any thought to playing an instrument?"

Agapita shook her head. "It's not really entered my head, sir, I've been too busy for it."

"Well, that's because you're new, and we need to drill the basics in you to get you up to readiness. Things will settle down before too long, and I think that you ought to – lots of the other girls play music of some sort, it's useful socialising. Do you have any idea what you might like?"

Agapita shrugged. "I'm happy to try, sir."

"What about, say, the trumpet?" Avise suggested. "I don't think that anyone else has one. Would you like to give that a try?"

Agapita inhaled to give an affirmative. And then caught her breath. Her mouth remained open, although it was now an aghast expression of horror. She had just processed the hopeful rising note in Avise's voice. He would be having her up on the dormitory roof, sounding out the reveille, every morning. Then there would be Piera. Then there would be the other cyborgs. Then there would be smiles. Bright, shining, animated eyes. Then there would be knives. Blood, death, lie-ins.

Agapita still wasn't sure about this whole God thing. She didn't question the principle any more than she questioned why the sky was blue and the day twenty-four hours long, and Avise had confidence in it, which was proof and security enough – still, though, the two Sunday masses that she'd been to felt like a lot of standing and scraping and sitting. She was beginning to see the rhyme in the movements, though, and when mercy such as the non-order of "would you like" was handed down to her she could see that those movements were responded to.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I don't think that a trumpet's quite the thing for me." Agapita bowed her head meekly.

"Oh, okay. Never mind then." Avise sounded a little disappointed as Sousa marches and sprinting bands faded into the distance.

"Can you play an instrument, sir?" Agapita said hastily, trying to change the subject before Avise gave her a formal and irresistible order to be conductor for a Second Generation marching band.

"Well, I can tinkle the ivories." Avise mimed pressing some keys in the air in front of him.

"Elephants make music?" Agapita wrinkled her nose in confusion.

"I mean, play the piano." Her handler explained. On many occasions he'd provided the accompaniment to a group of merry comrades belting out old songs and shanties with enthusiasm during a late evening in the mess. He'd also substituted as an organist for regimental services from time to time.

"That sounds nice." Agapita cooed, although she was imagining more a grand piano providing a gentle and artful undertone in an upmarket restaurant.

"I'm alright with the guitar as well," Avise continued, "I kept it up, in fact. I've had plenty of empty evenings to fill over the years, although what with everything lately" – Avise patted Agapita on the head endearingly – "I'm out of practice. I was even in a band, when I was younger."

"Oh, really?" Agapita said with genuine interest. While the more austere temperaments of those that had formed the initial wave of handlers meant that the first generation of cyborgs kept to largely classical genres, the tastes of the second generation were less prescribed. The girls chattered eagerly about bands and groups and acts and hunky dreamboats, and taste was viciously contested like alley-cats hissing and clawing over territory - the cyborg's face split into an eager grin when she realised that she didn't have to stick up a poster on her wall, she could boast the real thing.

"Me and some of my friends from my year's intake at the Modena officer college. We called ourselves the 'One-Pippers'," Avise smiled thoughtfully as nostalgia mixed with the mild evening air, "and as we were all assigned to the Garibaldi Brigade we were able to stay together after passing-out. Performed a few gigs in service clubs – all amateur stuff, really, but it was good for a laugh. It's how I met Calandra in the first place."

"Who's that?"

"...old friend of mine, I'll tell you about her another time. Anyway," Avise moved swiftly on, "we bashed stuff out for eighteen months or so. Apparently some sergeant's brother's wife's cousin's uncle's stepson was in the recording business and was thinking of offering us a small contract – 'Voices From the Front', that sort of thing. We broke up before anything came of it, though."

"Oh, that's a shame." Agapita was sympathetic. "Why did you turn it down?"

"Our Brigadier was retiring – he came into the mess one day when we were doing a spot, and I think that we touched a nerve. He took exception to the brigade being contaminated by devil music and I think that he despaired that his decades of service were all for naught if that was what he was leaving behind. It was his last day after fifty years, he was a bit emotional. So he came up on the stage and slung a guitar." Not quite an Exciting War Story, but at least an Amusing Service Anecdote.

Agapita brightened at the mention of that. When Avise had first mentioned the brigadier her heart had fell, expecting some dreadful tale of her poor handler's abuse by some unfeeling evil, made all the more heart-wrenching because she could do nothing to protect him from the past. However, the detail was encouraging – Agapita remembered, although she couldn't for the life of her think where, that breaking guitars was the sort of thing that famous and popular musicians did. "He liked your music?" She said excitedly.

Avise looked at Agapita strangely. "Uh, Agapita – he broke it over my _head_. I needed stitches."

"Oh, no!" Agapita stopped in the road and threw her hands up to her mouth in dismay. She was quiet for a moment, imagining the awful sensations of her handler's pain, and then her expression hardened in decision. "We should kill him!"

"Good grief, Agapita, you can't do that!" Avise cried in alarm.

"Why not?" Agapita stung at the rebuff, disliking that her very good idea was dismissed so out-of-hand. "You said yourself that the brigadier was retired – so he is of no more use, and the government would not care if he is dead. Besides, he did not only upset you, he _hurt _you. He _hurt _you," she repeated, a tremulous note entering her voice before it straightened out into decisiveness, "and enemies should know that no-one can do that to you, regardless of the position or circumstances."

With that sort of logic Avise worried if Agapita would rip up a forest whenever he got a paper cut. "Agapita, dear," Avise tried to soothe his charge, "the man was seventy-two when he retired. He's been dead for a decade. Hell, I expect just cranking his arms up for the swing took five years off of his life then and there. God got there well before you did."

"Oh." Agapita considered this new piece of intelligence for a moment. "...I am glad to see that God has the good sense to agree with me." She eventually concluded.

Which would have led to a fascinating meditation on the implications that divine omniscience held for cosmic causality and the philosophy of predestination, had they not been approaching the gate of the compound perimeter – and then felt the tension quivering through the taut air.

The Fiat van was plain in sight, just inside the gate – instead of being driven to the armoury to deposit the exercise equipment, or properly parked up at all. They could both sea that one door had been left open as the vehicle had been vacated in a hurry. The guardpost by the gate was empty, and while it was not a practical problem – Avise had a key to open the gate – nonetheless it should have been manned, even if only by a bored Carabiniere with nothing to do. Something was definitely up.

As Avise turned back to lock the gate shut behind them, Agapita saw a Section One analyst making his way across the lawn in front of the fire station. It wasn't a leisurely stroll, or even an interested jog, but an outright run. "Op. Jeunesse's been a balls-up," the agent called out to Agapita's hallo, throwing an arm towards the technology building as he ran, "and they're bringing in wounded!"

The fratello shared a concerned look, and then both took off in the same direction.

They were still a couple of hundred yards away when they saw two ambulances pulled up outside the hospital wing of the technology building, a large and urgent crowd around them. One advantage of the Social Welfare Agency's cover as a medical quango was that no-one saw anything amiss in casualties arriving – people didn't have to be hurried in under blankets; however, it didn't make what those vehicles actually carried any more palatable.

A trolley rolled out of the first ambulance, carrying an adult strapped firmly to the bed, his face heavily masked by bandages. Avise squinted, trying to get a clearer view of the body on the trolley as it was wheeled into the building. "Is Croce hurt?" He wondered.

"No, that's not Mr. Croce," Agapita clarified with her better eyesight, "I saw some blond hair."

Croce was indeed hurt, however – as the fratello neared the scene Avise could make him out stepping down from the second ambulance. Half of his face was puffy underneath a dressing, and his left arm was in a sling. He turned around, and helped down Henrietta from the step of the vehicle – her legs quivered unsteadily, almost as insecure as a newborn foal, and she looked oddly pathetic and vulnerable with her own head swathed in bandages.

Behind them, the paramedics lifted out a bodybag, that was not the shape of a body.

* * *

(Continued)


	4. Chapter 4

"_Gladiator Games_," Donato shook his head in baffled amazement, "the very thought of it! The idle rich looking for some excitement, while still keeping their manicured hands clean. It's incredible. I've read _thrillers_ with this sort of _plot_." His incredulity was plain to see.

"Life imitates art, I guess." Jose shrugged noncommittally, and immediately regretted it as his wrist twinged.

"Please keep still, Mr. Croce." Donato grumbled as he continued to apply plaster to Jose's forearm. "You were fortunate that this was only a simple fracture, but the worst clinical complications come from unco-operative patients."

"I promise that I'll be careful." Jose mumbled, like a boy promising he'd do better on his next spelling test.

A minute passed, punctuated by occasional wincing grunts and gasps from Jose as the cast around his arm gradually firmed up. Not raising his head from his handiwork, Donato mused. "Where did this injury come from?" He murmured.

Jose looked at the doctor strangely. "From a fucking bomb, what do you think?" He snapped testily.

Donato raised his eyebrows at Jose's uncharacteristic profanity – the handler must have been really out of sorts to slip like that – but didn't look up from his work. "Maybe you need some aspirin as well, thin that blood out a little." Donato wondered aloud. "It is unusual, though. You suffered a concussion from the blast and a variety of lacerations from, er, _shrapnel._.." – that gruesome image of Adele's scattered remains even gave a doctor pause for a moment – "... but, interestingly, not a single fracture other than this example here."

"The blast must have rammed my arm against the door pretty hard." Jose grunted.

"But this is your left arm." Donato pointed out helpfully. "In your passenger position it would have been towards the centre, not the door."

Jose clenched his eyes shut and was quiet for a second. He then opened them again slowly and fixed Donato with a hard, definite stare. "Doctor Donato. It's been a _very_ long day. Now, you are a scientist and I am not, but I'm quite happy to stay as a handler, not as a test monkey for your latest trauma research paper."

"Very well, Mr. Croce." Donato sighed dissatisfiedly as he finished applying the cast and lowered the handler's arm to the table. Maybe Belisario would have had better luck wangling the truth out of the handler, he always seemed more personable. "Please return to your hospital room – as you blacked out we have to keep you under observation for a day to make sure that there are no complications. You should be able to return to light duties the day after tomorrow."

* * *

One of the peculiarities of the Social Welfare Agency's onsite hospital was the complete absence of wards - all of the treatment was performed in surgeries, laboratories and individual rooms. It made sense – after all, given the Agency's _limited _clientele and specialist there was no call for conventional wards – and many in the world beyond would even see the privacy of four walls and the concentrated attention of an individual bed as a real luxury. Even so, Elenora Gabrielli couldn't help but feel a little unnerved by the thought of the place. She knew that she was being needlessly negativist and discolouring the world through a dark filter, but nonetheless each neat, clean box, a receptacle for posting in a casualty and then pulling him out again, made the room a pigeon hole – a pen – a cell. The benefits of the generous Agency salary had allowed Elenora to treat her mother to lavish care in a private hospital when she had contracted liver problems, but that only curdled her misgivings with the added sense of guilt at having somehow _accepted gift_, in the way of an impecunious politician. Elenora knew that it was ridiculous to present it that way, and she didn't know from where the feeling had conjured itself, but no amount of berating herself over her maudlin mindset altered the fact that it was seeping through her.

The fact that some of the rooms were _actual _cells didn't really help matters, either.

Elenora and her partner, Pietro Fermi, were in the Secure Treatment Wing of the hospital, looking through a two-way mirror towards the wounded terrorist that the Jose-Henrietta fratello had dragged in behind them. Elenora shivered at the sight of the figure, much of his exposed skin smothered in the white of plaster and bandages, making him seem unreal and statue-like as he lay motionless on a trolley. Elenora had glimpsed a hint of Henrietta's power in Sicily; that event remained powerful in her mind even after over a year since it had passed, and the long time to reflect on it had made it take on something like a mythic quality in her memory. It was difficult to reconcile her imaginings, alternately horrific visions of hellish massacres or clean, precise and painless applications of merely constraining and well-judged understated restraint according to fluctuations of her mood – to the still and unresponsive real physical result of the cyborg's power. Elenora had bobbed on ambivalence so long that the appearance of a solid reference only made everything else spin crazily in comparison.

"I keep expecting him to trampoline off the bed, smash through the mirror and strangle us both with his catheter." Pietro drawled in his deadpan gravelly manner. "To take out a support agent and then put both cyborg and handler through the wringer, he must be hot shit."

Well, that brought Elenora back down to Earth with a bump. Lightly shaking her head at her partner's coarse tongue, Elenora decided to defuse Pietro's foul-bomb by treating it as a matter-of-fact request. She slipped out the binder she was carrying underneath her arm and flipped it open to the report summary of the battle. "The assailant" – Elenora nodded to the casualty in the cell – "had put himself in position ahead of time, disguised as a roadworker to avoid public attention. It was late afternoon and rush hour—"

"Since when isn't it?" Pietro guffawed. "Why do you think I just use a Mini instead of all those flash sports cars that the Section Two crew have lined up outside as if the Agency is a Lamborghini showroom? For me, a dent just adds a bit of lived-in charm – for them, it's ten thousand euros and a week in the bodyshop." He smirked.

"Anyway, it was a well-coordinated attack because the density of traffic also impaired our escape." Elenora continued briskly, although she couldn't help but twitch a smile at Pietro's comment herself. "Our vehicle was armoured and pretty much impervious to small-arms, so he employed an M32 rotary grenade launcher—"

"How'd he sneak that through?" Pietro asked, his smile suddenly cutting down into a perturbed frown. "It's not exactly something you can hide in a bunch of flowers."

Elenora flicked through a few pages. "A couple of witnesses say that they thought it was just piping for the roadworks." She shrugged. "In any case, the fact remains that he was there, and could use the weapon.

"All shots were fired in rapid succession and aimed at the driver's door, where poor Adele was seated. The first rebounded off of the armour and failed to explode, although it did detonate when another car ran over it, wrecking it but thankfully not causing any more casualties." Elenora was tracing her finger over a diagram of the scene as she narrated events, tracing a perfect sequence through a dense and confused mess of multicoloured arrows and circles. "The second, however, did detonate, exploding on the surface – our car's armour buckled, but held. However, that actually left us at a disadvantage, as the third impact had its force concentrated in the depression – not much, but enough to tip the scales... and direct all of its energy through the drivers' side."

They were both quiet for a moment. Pietro burned a hooded glower through the mirror. The assassin was also quiet.

"So much for Adele Velice, then." Pietro grunted, not so much feeling as affecting a dismissive manner in an attempt to limit its emotional harm. "What happened after that?" Truth be told, he already knew the story – he had read the report himself – but, like all good tales, seeing justice prevail against adversity and the villain get his comeuppance in the end only improved with the telling, like the reassuring deep knock of solid wood, and it would hopefully be a tonic to his partner's darker inner thoughts, too.

"The car did was knocked off course from the third impact," Elenora sighed sadly and tiredly, "and the attacker's need to realign his arm gave Henrietta an opportunity to respond. She disembarked and opened fire, throwing him back and causing his fourth shot to go high, just inflicting some structural damage on the building behind the car. Realising that he'd lost his advantage, the attacker fled and Henrietta engaged in a foot pursuit." Elenora flicked through another few pages in the binder. "Fortunately in the panic and confusion no civilian seems to have become aware of a young girl with a submachine gun running between their legs."

Pietro couldn't help but give a short, dry chuckle at the thought of it.

"The attacker rendezvoused with a female accomplice, who also fired on Henrietta. Henrietta defended herself—" Elenora broke off suddenly, and her eyes narrowed. Her head jerked a little as she squinted closely at the report, studying the text in depth. Pietro glanced at her questioningly, but Elenora evidently dismissed whatever concern had nudged her and with a quick shake of the head she brought herself back up again. "Once the accomplice was despatched, Henrietta resumed the chase, and ran the assassin to ground. A close-quarters fight ensued, with Henrietta sustaining three separate head wounds from pistol shots, but despite that, she successfully... restrained the attacker." Elenora closed the binder and looked back to their prisoner gnawing her lip worriedly. That was one detail that could not be buried in the footnotes.

Pietro himself didn't have any concern for the attacker's suffering – shooting a girl three times in the head at close range (and then of course there was that whole explosive assassination shebang) wasn't exactly the action of a blameless innocent cruelly malhandled by indifferent fate – but could respect what those events implied. "Three successive shots to the same location on a moving vehicle with a heavy weapon – and then three headshots to a small, moving target on top of that..." Pietro shook his head, impressed despite himself.

"Bugger me with a pogo-stick," he breathed, "this guy's _good_."

"Not good enough, it seems." Elenora sighed philosophically as she viewed the assassin through the glass, his face almost entirely buried in plaster to hold together his jaw, almost smashed to mulch following Henrietta's ministrations.

Pietro shuddered involuntarily. He had himself experienced the… mercurial nature of cyborgs once before. Sweetness and light, and darkness and spite.

"Alright, let's get on with it." Pietro led Elenora into the treatment room.

The bedridden figure glanced across at the two Section One agents as they entered. For some inexplicable reason Elenora felt suddenly abashed and turned her head away. Once the moment had passed, Pietro dragged around the bedside cabinet, scraping noisily on the floor, so that it was facing their wounded prisoner and within arm's reach. After he had done so, Elenora opened the small laptop that she was carrying with her binder, and placed it down on top of the cabinet. Pietro picked up the prisoner's unresisting uninjured arm and laid it down on the laptop keyboard. Their prisoner couldn't speak, but that didn't mean that he couldn't type.

Much to their astonishment, he did so, immediately.

NAME RICO TELASSAN AGE 32 BLOOD O+ BORN BOLOGNA NO PRIOR FELONY

"Oh!" Elenora said aloud, genuinely surprised at the prisoner's lack of reticence. Then she narrowed her eyes as she studied the writing more closely. "This was your first terrorist act?"

NO PRIOR FELONY CONVICTION

"Looks like someone got careless." Pietro smiled wryly. 'Rico Tellasan' clenched his eyes shut, and a long regretful moment passed before he typed again.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW

Pietro narrowed his eyes. "Well, our first question would be why you even _wish_ to be co-operative."

JUST IN IT FOR THE MONEY

Elenora drew herself up in some indignation once she had read that. The superficial, dismissive, conceited manner of it offended her. "Just", but not _just_. Not by any means. "You're not in line to be awarded any bounties, you know!" She huffed, rather importantly. Pietro threw her a warning look across the bed, chiding her to not shut the prisoner down by being too pushy. The assassin paused for a moment's consideration before tapping out his next line.

WHAT IS THE TERRORISM TARIFF NOW

"Thirty years, no remission" Elenora said automatically.

SIX WITH CHANCE OF PAROLE AND YOU GET NAMES DATES PLACES

Pietro puffed out his cheeks. "That's _quite _a markdown."

PENAL CODE ARTICLE 176 LIBERTA CONDIZIONATA DONE AT LEAST 30 MONTHS BY TIME OF RELEASE ALL NICE AND LEGAL

Clicking filled the air as Elenora automatically fluttered through her limitless Moleskine notebook. "He's right about that, at least." She concluded grimly.

Pietro shook his head. "Yes, but Mr. Telassan here obviously has a rather too-high opinion of himself to think that he can dictate terms—"

GIACOMO DANTE

"Deal." Elenora and Pietro said together.

* * *

"Gladiators?" Petris frowned.

"I think that the fantasy makes it more exciting for them." Draghi shrugged.

Both of the Agency's Section Chiefs had been called to the Palazzo Baracchini in Rome to provide the Minister of Defence with a personal update on the fallout from Operation Jeunesse. Lorenzo and Draghi stood beside each other (but not together), facing Minister Petris at her desk.

"I thought that this man was a Padanian?" Petris asked.

"Only a contractor taking on extra work. He couldn't tell us anything about Giacomo Dante that we don't know already," Draghi inhaled, "_but _he has provided us with a viable entry point into the so-called 'Gladiator Games'. Are you aware of them, ma'am?"

"I know _of _it, but I can't pretend to special knowledge." Petris admitted.

"Well, Minister, you're familiar with underground street fighting?" Lorenzo.

"The concept, yes, although my bare-knuckle record isn't the legend of the alleyways." Petris smiled gently.

Draghi gave Lorenzo an askance glance, resenting his interruption and his stepping a foot over Draghi's side of the line. He continued quickly, before Lorenzo could take control of the conversation. "Well, the organisers would probably try to sell you some guff that it's something more profound, culturally-attuned and beyond base rutting, but all it is is street fighting for the rich. Not that they actually take part in it, of course, they just have some patsies squabble for them like bear-baiting."

"Rich?" Petris laughed lightly. "Good sirs, unlike you, my salary is subject to public scrutiny. Both of you make twice as much money as I do!"

Draghi coughed embarrassedly. "...still not as much as these guys." He managed to mutter defensively, before thinking to change tack and so regain his choler. "But whether they're princes or paupers doesn't matter in the slightest. I've tried multiple times to bring to your attention the outrages that my Section has discovered them perpetrating..."

"Yes, Draghi, I know – your section's efforts are appreciated and will, indeed, have a vital role in the upcoming operation," Petris sighed, wearily enacting the tired ritual of placating the ornery Public Security chief, "But before now our hands have been tied down by other demands on our resources. AISI is going dizzy from running around and chasing down the jihadis that wash in with every boat; the Camorra and the Sacra Corona Unita are going at it hammer and tongs for control of the drugs trade south of the Gargliano. Just in the past fortnight more than fifty members of the Finance Guard have been suspended for taking bribes.

"And then, there's that small and inconsequential matter of mounting inclinations towards secessionism apparent amongst the population of the northern regions of the country." Petris tipped her head sardonically. "The fact is, as dubious as the practise may be, pursuing the shabby decadent indulging in a new-age bloodsport in their own insular circle has not been an operational priority."

"Until today." Lorenzo breathed.

Petris glanced down at the personnel file for Adele on the desk. The maroon ink of the stamp "DECEASED" on the cover resembled dried blood – perhaps deliberately, with an unwelcome flicker of personality from some civil servant who fancied himself a poet.

"Until today." Petris nodded solemnly.

"What are you doing for Miss. Velice?" She asked suddenly, after a short pause.

"She has family in Umbria," Lorenzo explained, "and they're giving her a private funeral there. Ferro will attend as the official Agency representative. Gregorio Cessna, from my support unit, has also requested leave to go – I think that he and Adele had something going on."

Despite the circumstances, Petris's lips twitched in a momentary frown as old injunctions against workplace romance rustled within her. Lorenzo noticed the tic but didn't he didn't consider it to be a fault or something for criticism – the Minister's distance may have been deadening but that was not anything that she had a choice in. Besides, people responding with their hearts in full furious flush was half of the reason why Italy was in the state it was now.

"In any case, we now have smoking-gun proof that the Gladiator Games are being used as a finishing school for Padanian militants," Draghi jabbed a finger at Adele's personnel file, taking a less reflective and more forthright approach to the implications of her passing, "and that _does _make this whole sordid little circle-jerk" – Petris raised her eyebrows at Draghi's brazen attitude, and Lorenzo inched his head away – "an _active security concern_."

"...As we've said." Petris concealed her expression behind steepled fingers. "You seem to be particularly belligerent about this matter, Mr. Draghi."

"It's obscene." Draghi snarled. "Squalid squander at its most crushingly futile and self-destructive. It's a pollution, and I've wanted to clean it up ever since the stink of it assaulted me." Draghi drew himself up. "I have had a team working on the Gladiator Games for months, and we've assembled a substantial dossier on its haunts, and those who facilitate it. My strategic office has a number of infiltration scenarios that could be implemented immediately."

"Ma'am," Lorenzo began worriedly, cutting over Draghi and trying to divert the course of the conversation onto a different route, "There's enough bad blood in the north alone as it is – let's not complicate relations further. All of those sponsoring the Gladiator Games are public figures, some politicians, along with some foreigners outside the EU as well. A hasty reaction could have repercussions that are unpredictable at best and outright catastrophic at worst..."

Draghi actually grabbed Lorenzo's shoulder and roughly spun the Section Two chief around to face him. Thrown off-balance mentally as well as physically by the outburst, Lorenzo was completely unprepared for Draghi's vehemence and almost felt as though he was buffeted by a gale as Draghi lambasted him. "So, what, then? Is Section Two your own little tinpot kingdom for you to lord over? Are the cyborgs locked in your damn _toybox _for no-one else to play with?"

Lorenzo stumbled backwards, trying and not entirely succeeding to mask it as a restrained and disdainful dismissal of Draghi's temper.

"Mr. Draghi paints a particularly vivid picture of the situation..." Petris selected her words carefully, "and I have to say that I agree with him."

Both section chiefs were oddly relieved: Lorenzo for the simple ability to recompose himself after the sudden violent surge, and Draghi for the gratitude that came from not being chastised himself – after blowing himself out, there had been the hollow feeling that he had pushed too far. Neither section chief had distinguished himself in the recent exchange and both were silently grateful for the defence minister's circumspection and tact.

"The Social Welfare Agency's mission has never been confined to the reduction of the Five Republics," Petris said calmly and levelly, "and Mr. Lorenzo will recall that Section Two has performed a variety of, shall we say, ancillary operations in the past – this should be no different. _Both _of you have a role to play – Draghi's section in establishing the full disposition of these 'Gladiator Games', and Lorenzo's section acting upon it – and this time, it is entirely appropriate, given their foreknowledge, to do so at Section One's direction."

Draghi allowed himself a smile; Lorenzo remained impassive. Petris continued.

"Mr. Lorenzo, as the Section Two Chief you of course have complete control over operational matters, but may I please make a suggestion?"

Lorenzo nodded his head. "Yes, minister."

"This new fratello – the Avise-Agapita pair. It would be helpful if you could assign them a principal role in this mission."

Lorenzo flicked his gaze aside, twisting his mouth in uncertainty. "Ma'am, Agapita has only been activated for a fortnight, and has yet to participate in combat. It may be a little premature to assign her a central role. Respectfully – how would it be helpful?"

"I did some arithmetic a while back." Petris announced.

Lorenzo clenched his eyes shut. He could already tell where this was headed.

"This Agapita – do you know how much she cost to build?" Petris asked.

"I don't have the exact figure, ma'am, but it was something like a hundred and fifty million euros?" It emerged as a deflating sigh of capitulation, rolling over and receiving the Defence Minister's argument without resistance.

"A fair tranche more, actually – one hundred and fifty-eight million, seven hundred and ninety-four thousand, three hundred and twenty-two euros, and eighteen cents. With that, we could buy, and have cash to spare in each case, two Eurofighters – or _thirty-two _Ariete battle tanks."

"Or run a thousand-bed hospital for a year." Draghi muttered under his breath.

"I'd prefer bringing one girl back to life to keeping a thousand hypochondriacs whining about their aches and twinges, thank you, Mr. Draghi!" Petris snapped harshly at the Section One Chief, glaring at him for speaking out of turn. Training the hard stare on Draghi for a few further wilting seconds, she turned back to Lorenzo. "And that is only half of the equation.

"You have performed security evaluations and participated in past defence reviews – I assume that you're familiar with the concept of cost-per-kill. At present in Iraq, the Americans are expending three hundred thousand dollars' worth of effort to put down each insurgent. Translate that to our own situation, and Agapita needs to kill a little more than five hundred Padanians before she even _starts_ to become cost-efficient.

"Get cracking."

Both Section Chiefs bowed their heads in deference. "Yes, ma'am."

Petris nodded, acknowledging their obedience. "Thank you. Mr. Draghi, begin collating your intelligence on this gladiator wing's movements – Mr. Lorenzo will be applying to you for them later today. And Mr. Lorenzo, please stay behind for a moment."

"Certainly ma'am. See you back in the compound, Pieri." Draghi said to the man beside him as he turned to leave – a smug grin spreading across his face as he showed his back to the other two. Even despite the Defence Minister's earlier chastisement, the meeting had lightened his spirits. Although the cyborgs were to be conducting the mission his department would nonetheless be indispensible to its expeditious action, and as he left Lorenzo behind to endure Petris's 'suggestions' he smirked that it was about damn time that the endlessly-indulged Special Operations finally had to contend with some constraints of its own.

When Draghi had left, Petris turned to Lorenzo and continued straight away.

"Sorry about having to say that, but there are some other matters attached to Mr. Mancini and Agapita that are actually of more concern to me. Questions were raised in Cabinet about the... _source material _from which Agapita was derived. A number of my colleagues were," Petris licked her lips, choosing her words carefully, "_dissatisfied_ with the assignment of a relation from a known Camorra lieutenant to the government's assassination squad. They see it as infecting the Agency with corruptibility and rewarding recidivism, and so they want visible assurance that she is reliable. Please, don't protest, I know as well as you do that it's a ridiculous complaint and that a cyborg's past has no bearing on her conduct now..."

_If only_, Lorenzo thought wistfully, as the Defence Minister continued.

"...but people still have to be placated – we all have our crosses to bear."

"I suppose so." Lorenzo sighed unhappily.

"I would also like Avise Mancini himself to have a role in the mission."

"But, of course he will be involved, Minister – they're a fratello, they work as a pair anyway." Lorenzo was confused.

"Yes, but he needs to be involved in the mission's core planning. He _is _an experienced officer I don't imagine that it would constrain your effectiveness in any way."

Lorenzo wrinkled his nose. The Minister was entirely correct, but even so it was an irregular arrangement. "Why him specifically, though, ma'am?"

Petris was silent for a moment before responding. "Let's just say that he's a person of interest in another project _outside _of the Agency's purview." She noticed Lorenzo's strange, questioning expression. "Don't worry, Lorenzo, it's just an old Army leftover, nothing that reflects on his present conduct."

Lorenzo breathed a visible sigh of relief. He had had awful visions of truckloads of MPs battering down the gates and overturning offices while Avise, the culprit for some crime, was distracted elsewhere, which the Minister's reassurance had dispersed. Maybe he was being considered for a medal? Lorenzo couldn't help but feel a twinge of jealousy – despite nearly forty years of service to the government, none of it was in a uniform and so he had never enjoyed any shiny treat to reward and distinguish his conduct, only the vague and faint hope of a knighthood once he retired – and it was more likely that he'd be quietly brushed under the carpet. Lorenzo had to recite a calming mental mantra that being some military magpie scraping over dirt for scraps of chintzy trinkets was nothing admirable or dignifying. Or so he told himself, anyway.

"I believe that covers everything relevant for now." Petris announced, ending the meeting. Lorenzo gathered his various files and made to leave, but as he put his hand on the doorknob, Petris called out and stopped him. "One thing I want to leave you with, Mr. Lorenzo – please don't make so much of an effort to antagonise Draghi."

"Yes, minister?" Lorenzo furrowed his brow in confusion.

"Yes, chief." Petris nodded gravely.

Lorenzo couldn't quite understand where the minister was coming from, and felt a creeping sense of affront at being compared to the petty and aggrandising Public Security chief. The minister had a far-ranging view looking down from on high, of course, but as broad as her perspective was one of the consequences of distance was a loss of detail. Surely she wouldn't say such a thing if she was aware of Draghi's constant—

"I'm sure that you only want the best, Mr. Lorenzo, but acting austere and aloof as you do does not necessarily make you exceptional – it does easily make you arrogant, though. He's your ally, not your rival – and your colleague, _not _your subordinate."

* * *

Lorenzo was silent and pensive as Petris's P.A. threaded a course through the chattering and clattering clutter of the Palazzo Barrachini's offices and led him back down to the car pool where his staff car was waiting. Ordering his driver to return him to the Social Welfare Agency with little more than a grunt. Lorenzo remained quiet for much of the journey, staring out of the window at the bustle of Rome. All of those people, sweating under the sun, living their lives and beavering away at their business; travelling to and fro, hurrying from place to place, moving together and dancing around work, rest and play; sitting at café with seditionist pamphlets, punching out poisonous hate mail on their cellphones, scurrying furtively with bombs in their rucksacks and pistols in their handbags.

With a tired sigh Lorenzo turned away from the cinema reel of life outside whirring past him and picked up the carphone, dialling Draghi.

"Adriano, it's me." Lorenzo announced when he connected. "You were saying that you already have insertion plans for the Gladiator Games prepared?"

"Yes, hang on a second…" There was a crackle over the phone as Draghi rustled through his own papers. "Actaully, let's hang fire on this until we get back to the compound, Pieri." Draghi sighed over the phone. "It's a bit impractical if I can't actually show you the documents. Why are we in separate cars, anyway? It's such a waste."

Lorenzo thought for a moment. He tapped his knee with a finger, and made a decision. "For my part, Adriano, spreading the risk seemed prudent. I was concerned about security leaks after Padanians were able to secure a complete itinerary of my agents' activities, which resulted in one of their deaths."

Draghi hung up.

* * *

Jean found Avise on the roof – stargazing at midday.

"Readying yourself?" Jean called out as he crossed the platform from the stairwell.

"Eh?" Avise turned back from looking out over the edge and smoking another cigarette to see the new arrival. "Oh, Croce. And no, I'm not one to mope." Avise turned back.

"Don't worry, I'm not judging." Jean reassured Avise as he came up alongside him. "It's your first mission, after all. Natural to be a little anxious."

Avise's shoulders shook in a wry chuckle_._ It was touching that the Agency's resident hardass was making an effort to feel concerned – Avise felt privileged. "It's not _my _first mission."

Jean shook his head. "No, it's not, but by implication..."

"Yeah." Avise sighed out with a hard ember-breath. "I don't know. I suppose that I do feel a bit of pressure. I feel responsible, y'know?"

Jean arched his eyebrows in surprise. "And you never did before?"

"Not in the same way, because, well... it's not the same, is it?" Avise gestured vaguely, struggling to grab at the ineffable blooming around him and box and condense it down to something expressible. Curls of cigarette smoke described lazy loops and wandering whorls before him.

Jean glanced down at his own hands and flexed a fist for a moment, considering Rico in the broken reflection of Avise's own inarticulate honesty. His cyborg was there to effect his will – she was another limb, an extension of his reach, an expression of his bloody determination and bilious rancour. In some respects, then, Rico was part of Jean – but he could not say so as lightly and casually as he would for his hair, or his fingernails. Men would be boys, or would at least like to, but even though he remained the same person with the same name Jean could not pretend to feel the same way about the world as he did when he was young. As Jean had changed in his growth from child to adult, so too had the arrival of Rico, a new growth, altered him too – and as other people wistfully yearned for past youth, Jean was not entirely sure if he welcomed or enjoyed the strange and distracting sensations brought on by the weight of that new addition to his self that now burdened him. Rico was his weapon, his fangs, his fist – she couldn't be anything more. Jean feared her becoming something more.

"Can I ask you something personal... Avise?"

Avise blinked, taken aback by the use of the informal Christian name instead of the proper surname. Jean wasn't trying to approach him in the guise of the chief handler. "...you can ask, but I can't guarantee that I'll answer, Jean." Avise said after a moment's consideration.

"That's fair." Jean paused for a moment to let the air settle and leave it level for the next ripple to pass through it. "I'd like to know about Calandra."

Avise froze, his cigarette halfway to his mouth. It took a short while for the sun to thaw him out again. "...that depends on how much you know." He said, guardedly.

"Pretty much the whole story, I'm afraid," Jean sounded genuinely apologetic, "and what happened to Edvige as well. She's still in an orphanage, you know."

"What are you wasting your time with that? Why would I want to know that?" Avise snapped angrily. "I disowned _that person_. She's not my daughter. She doesn't know me from Adam, and I don't know her from Eve. Do I care about the lodgings of every random pleb in the street? Well, do I?" Avise grated everything out angrily and forcefully, but rather too quickly to disguise that it was not a roaring charge into battle but rather popping smoke to cover himself as he fled.

Jean winced, aware that he'd screwed up with that last remark. This wasn't how he'd wanted things to go, at all. "I'm really sorry, Avise, I really am. I promise you – _promise _you – that it doesn't go further than me, the Chief, and Ferro, and that's only because we have operational responsibilities. The rest of the Section just has you as a widower, and nothing else."

"I _am _just a widower, and nothing else. Oh yes. Nothing else at all. She's made damn sure of that." Avise bent his head down and clenched his eyes shut. "...God damn it, Jean, you know it all already. Why are you picking on me?"

Now Jean himself was quiet for a few moments. He looked away, and unconsciously rubbed his finger where his engagement ring used to be.

Avise took Jean's reluctant silence not as high-handedness but rather as a symptom of the chief handler's own uncertainty and vulnerability. Appreciating the rare and private confidence of such an exposed aspect of the flinty-faced Jean, Avise's own attitude softened, loosening his aversion to the unhappy topic. He sighed something like a death-rattle. "... Alright. Go on then."

"Calandra..." Jean swallowed nervously, suddenly nauseous as his stomach floated with that moment of rushing vertigo that old soldiers must once have felt as they launched and surged up over the lip of the trenches. "Did... did you love her?"

Surprisingly, Avise didn't pause to gather his thoughts but responded immediately. "Back then? Yeah, I probably did." He paused. "But not now. Not anymore."

Avise flicked his half-finished cigarette off into the air. The chiselled-down chalk turned end over end as it fell down the building, the rush of air stirring its dull ember to true flame. The flame surged for one frantic second, trying to consume itself before impact, but the cigarette patted down onto the lawn. It sputtered smoke for a few seconds, charring the dry summer grass.

"Not for a very long time."

Avise reached for another cigarette, but changed his mind halfway through – he replaced the cigarette back in its packet and slipped it back into his pocket.

"You're a driven man, aren't you, Jean?"

Jean nodded, his kill-count rattling in his head from the movement. "I suppose I am."

"So am I. For a similar reason. Not quite the _same_ one, though." Avise sighed deeply. "I suppose 'hounded' would fit better."

Jean shifted his feet uncomfortably, not quite sure if he was prepared to have his own Sophiac cosmology shaken by Avise's new perspective, but feeling acutely that it would be cowardly to flee now. "How so?" He asked.

"_They record that from the beginning God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh_" Avise held his finger up to the air, moving it about as he spoke as though he was conducting an orchestra. "It's true, too. Now, I didn't know Calandra for terribly long: we married quick, probably too quick, and – _haaah_ – 'that person' was still an infant when Calandra decided that she needed a break from parenting and went to have a shave in a nice hot bath. Out of coming up to forty years of life, she was with me for only two – but it's a sacrament, a sea-change. It wouldn't have mattered if I was with her for ten years or ten minutes – she injected herself into me, and she's been part of me ever since.

"The evil fucking _cow_."

Jean blinked and retreated a step from the roof-edge, physically taken aback. "What?"

"They say that ghosts are unquiet spirits, don't they? Those that died without satisfaction? My wife is a shade, a jagged frozen flash of the pain she died in – hurt, confused, despairing – and angry, selfish, and petulant, too, lashing out at the world in one final kick of spite, with that extra edge of good old Catholic guilt, God help me. That shade has filtered into my shadow – whenever the world seems bright, it's there to darken it. That black tone has been a splinter driving into me ever since she died. The angel on my shoulder? The devil on my back!"

Avise turned toward Jean. Jean blinked in surprise. Avise suddenly looked very tired, grey under the eyes as though his face had drained and sunken while he had been speaking. "You understand, don't you?" He asked, a little plaintively.

Jean thought that he might. He was blessed that unlike Avise, Sophia never asked, never needled, never griped or demanded – Jean gave the blood and misery of Padania to her freely, as a gift to a lover. But there was the memory of Sicily... an empty, dark room – one that was not filled, nor lit, by the glowing apparition that had appeared there – a figure that had nothing to give to the world anymore, but still imposed herself upon it. A blight, an abscess, a drain on reality which demanded that life and labour be poured into it. Jean often tried to tell himself that his vision of Enrica had been some alcohol-fuelled fever dream, an unlocking of some mental insecurity that psychologists would clap their hands and cavort in giddy glee over... but in moments of honesty, he knew that his little sister, insisting on the ending of life to match her own lack of one, quite consciously and wilfully preying on his obligation, had become a figure of cold Hell.

"Yeah. Yeah, I do." Jean thought he might lay a reassuring hand on Avise's shoulder, but flinched away, the contact feeling overblown and absurd. He saw invisible slender hands forcing his arm up and actively resisted them.

Avise was looking back out over the roof again. He suddenly raised his own arm and waved enthusiastically at a figure below. Jean followed the other man's gaze and saw an impression of Avise's cyborg walking across the square. As Avise lowered his arm, he rubbed at his chin. "Devil on my back – time to throw it off." He lifted his head, and suddenly seemed a lot brighter. "Still, better to have loved and lost, quantum of solace, and all that, I guess.

"Thank God for women, eh? May they always bring us misery and suffering." Avise held up his fist.

Jean raised his own fist, and the two men bumped their knuckles together. "Amen to that."

* * *

The "Hunter's Mark Shooting School" was the rather inordinately grand title fastened above the door of an indoor pistol range that had reoccupied a small disused warehouse in a rundown area of industrial Rome. Jacopo surveyed the shabby brick frontage of the building with a critical frown as he got out of his car in the range's rough dirt car-park. The snaps, cracks and pops emanating from within the building seemed more to Jacopo of the creaking and wheezing of ancient joints and tenons of crumbling decrepitude. It also made Jacopo regret skipping breakfast.

Jacopo crunched over the car-park and into the building. The reception area was located in a boxy annex built into the side of the building. It was quite a simple room, furnished only by the usual fittings of a few seats with old dog-eared magazines bearing titles like _COMBAT _and _SURVIVAL MONTHLY_, a cork noticeboard for the miscellaneous confetti of small ads hung up on one wall, a vending machine for soft drinks and a counter where you could also buy ammunition. There were two exits – a transparent screen door leading into the firing lanes, and a small staircase leading up to a viewing gallery looking over them. Jacopo went up the staircase, murmuring a response to the greeting of the attendant behind the counter as he went. There were sixteen lanes – fourteen in one long rank, plus a block of two whose firing positions were separated from the others by a wall of concrete breeze-blocks, presumably where someone could have private tuition. The range was fairly quiet at this time of day, assuming that business in urban doldrums like this was ever any better – only perhaps a third of the lanes were occupied – and so Jacopo had little difficulty espying who he had come for.

Jacopo went back down to the reception and walked straight over to the reception desk. He leaned his left elbow on the counter so that he was looking down from the reception towards the range. With his other arm he reached over his left and pushed a fifty-euro note across the top towards the attendant. "The couple in Lane Eight. They come here often?"

The attendant glanced down at the note without moving his head. He licked his lips, and then flicked his gaze back upwards again to Jacopo, who was watching the attendant out of the corner of his eye as he continued to keep his head facing down the lanes.

"The De Marcheses? They're father and daughter, not an item. In any case, yeah, they come by pretty often. Once or twice a week, most weeks. They both have membership cards."

"Thank you." Jacopo twitched his head in a fractional nod, and took his finger off the note. In one fluid movement, the attendant reached over, slid the note across the rest of the counter and into a pocket on his apron and lifted up a headset, with ear defenders and eye protection were integrated into an single object, with his other hand and deposited it before Jacopo.

Jacopo picked up the headset and looked at the attendant questioningly.

"Goggle rental." The attendant explained, patting his apron pocket.

Jacopo smiled understandingly and walked out of the reception and over to the firing alleys, pulling the headset on as he did so.

The attendant fingered the banknote as he turned away to look busy. It was incredibly annoying... Section One rules wouldn't let him keep the bribe and he'd have to declare it once the fratello had cleared off with the mark. By rights, it should be a perk of the job...

Jacopo walked slowly over to Lane Eight, ranging his gaze idly over the other shooters that he passed. He noticed flaws where their grip or posture could be tightened, but did not deign to offer free advice, instead just tipping his head back and viewing them critically. The racket of reports rebounding around the open warehouse were incredibly troublesome, too – turning each single shot into a fusillade, and so making a simple walk more like being buffeted by a stinging cliff-side gale, or squatting along a trench during a bombardment. Small wonder that this place never did good enough business to promote itself into better premises – trapped in a hole.

Lane Eight was occupied by a teenage girl, watched over by an older man sitting on the bench behind the firing step. He was resting his elbows on his knees, and watching her intently over steepled fingers, rubbing his thumbnails against his upper lip. Despite his apparent concentration, the man noticed Jacopo's approach and nodded a simple, silent greeting as he drew up at the lane. Both men waited for the girl to finish firing off her magazine and press the button mounted on the wall of the lane's firing step to bring the target card back, before they began to speak.

Both the man and the girl were dressed similarly, in trainers, jeans, and thick heavy rugby shirts. The man's hands were bare, but the girl was wearing black neoprene gloves. The man bore the livery of the Italian national team and was stained with a number og grey flashes which indicated that this was a 'work' pair he normally wore when going shooting; the girl's by contrast appeared not just clean but new, and was bearing the broad fesswise green and white stripes of Benetton Rugby Treviso – which was a little odd, as they were nowhere near Veneto, and an incongruent detail which Jacopo stored away in his mind for later review. More to the point, the girl looked decidedly uncomfortable in her clothes – every now and again she would scratch at her sleeve or tug at her jeans, apparently unconsciously.

Preferring skirts to trousers, though, did not detract from her apparent aim – as the conveyer rattled to a stop over the counter of the firing step and the girl pluck her target card down, Jacopo could see a tight fist of a dense grouping around the bullseye. A promising start.

"I am Jacopo – we spoke on the phone?" Jacopo offered his hand.

"Felipo de Marchese." The man nodded, taking Jacopo's hand. He had a strong grip, and broad shoulders – it seemed that the man was very fit, but as he grasped Jacopo's hand Jacopo noticed small yellow stains around his fingernails which betrayed a regular smoker – how long was that health and strength going to last?

Felipo motioned over to the girl. "And this is my daughter, Columbina."

At the mention of her name Columbina suddenly fixed on her father, completely blanking out Jacopo. Her grey eyes seemed totally absorbed by Felipo,

Felipo noticed his daughter's behaviour and shook his head lightly. "Ach, Columbina, it's alright, he's a friend."

"Oh, right." Columbina breathed. She turned her eyes, head and body around to Jacopo, but moved slowly at first, as if she had to physically tear herself from her father like a long strip of Velcro, or had to overcome the inertia of a heavy weight in order to start moving. "Pleased to meet you, sir." She bowed her head, and her short black hair shook lightly as she did so. Jacopo couldn't help but twitch a smile – it did look very cute.

Felipo coughed pointedly. Jacopo glanced over at him, pulling his smile into an irritable frown. Jacopo disliked Felipo's presumption – _he _was the prospective client here, and it was only by Jacopo's recommendation that he was going to gain admission into the Gladiator Games, so really he should be making more of an effort to keep the agent's good humour. Then again, a voice snickered in the back of Jacopo's head, he couldn't afford to be picky or pushy either – even though he'd been exonerated from that whole farrago with Simon fucking Coe, he could tell that the M.C.'s patience was being strained and he needed to bring in something special for the next game – and in the absence of something elite, he needed a _novelty_. He hoped that De Marchese _père et fille _would prove to be it. With effort, Jacopo pulled his frown back into a smile again.

"It's good to see families sharing the same interests." Jacopo said conversationally, to neutralise the tone of the conversation. There was a hint of honesty behind it, though - he'd never got along with his own son.

"Yeah, chip off the old block, isn't she?" Felipo smiled at Columbina.

"Help me, sir, he's taken me and mutated me into a regular daddy's girl!" Columbina smiled. Her father's permission had seemed to dismiss her initial stiffness, and she was becoming much more warm and loose.

"Well then," Jacopo nodded towards the lane bay, "let's see if that's really the case."

A meaningful look passed between father and daughter – Jacopo could tell that she was fully aware of who Jacopo was and what he represented, and that she seemed as invested in this as her father was. An interesting level of confidence there.

There were two pistols set down on the firing step's counter – a two-tone automatic with a silver body and a black slide, and an antique-looking revolver which Jacopo didn't recognise off-hand. As a fresh target card was sent down on the conveyor, Columbina picked up and prepared the automatic, and then chewed through three magazines quietly and sedulously, with a flat, bland, unreadable expression, firing and reloading without comment – another curious change in manner, she seemed to doff them like hats.

After discharging the last of the third magazine, Columbina pulled back the target card and proffered it to Jacopo for his inspection. Jacopo lifted his goggles up off his face to review it closely – three more tight, efficient, accurate groups – one at the top of the scoring ring, another at the centre, and another at the bottom, together forming a neat vertical line up the target card. Jacopo hummed, impressed – perhaps there was potential here.

One thing he wanted to satisfy himself with, though. He handed the card to Felipo. "Does Dad want to show his little girl how it's done?"

Felipo cocked an eyebrow at Jacopo quizzically, but then shrugged and gently moved Columbina aside to take up his own position at the firing step. He took up the revolver, and blatted off three sets of six rounds casually. He returned his own target card to reveal eighteen holes – all on the scoring ring, it had to be said, but scattered broadly across it like a barrel of buckshot. Good, but not great, with a decent posture and entirely competent but evidently someone who lacked the instinctive patience to line up perfect marksmanship and whose trigger-finger twitched with the instinct to fire. It seemed about right for what Felipo had said of his background. That he stuck with a limited revolver instead of a more capacious automatic seemed odd when he evidently preferred weight of fire to precision, but if the revolver was some sort of fanciful affectation of a gunslinger, that fit too.

Jacopo glanced over at Columbina, who throughout the entire time that her father had been shooting had been seated quietly herself, watching her father's back and occasionally flicking her eyes momentarily at Jacopo. She kept her legs together and folded to the side slightly from the knees, as though she'd been wearing a skirt instead of jeans. Her hands remained in her lap – clenched, Jacopo noted with surprise. Yet her face betrayed no sign of anger or anxiety... was she repressing something incredible, or just filled with an energy that needed expression?

"Right then!" Felipo's exclamation of bright, breezy decision caught Jacopo off-guard and interrupted his inspection. "Need a coffee, after all that exercise. What about yourself."

Jacopo smiled and nodded. "You're buying..."

* * *

"...you have enough money?"

"Yes, here." Felipo pulled a manila folder out of his bag – Jesus, this was a genuine 'brown envelope' job – and pushed it across the table to Jacopo. "Four thousand euros, our entry fee." Jacopo took it straight away and slid it into his own satchel. Felipo looked surprised. "You aren't going to count it?"

Jacopo smiled indulgently. "I'm confident that you're not going to try and swindle me at this stage of the game."

"Why, thank you." Felipo blinked.

_And if you do, there're other methods of accumulating the equivalent value. _Jacopo thought silently, looking at father and daughter over the rim of his coffee cup as he took a swig. He gasped a breath of satisfaction as he set the cup back down again.

"I'm surprised that you were able to assemble it on such short notice, though." Jacopo said conversationally. "I understood that you're enrolling in this because money is tight."

"I called in a couple of favours, and made investments against future earnings." Felipo grunted. "I wasn't put into this situation through financial impropriety.

"No, it was because you were pushing crack cocaine on base." Jacopo smiled thinly.

Felipo bristled, but did not lash out, instead looking down and scowling fiercely into his coffee, his cheeks coloured. With a concerned expression, Columbina reached out and laid his hand over her own. Felipo responded to her touch and they both squeezed their hands together. All the while, Jacopo spectated.

"So, Miss. Columbina," Jacopo drawled, "you use a Tanfoglio TA-90. That's a copy of the old CZ-75, isn't it?"

"An _update_." Felipo weighed in, a little importantly. "Authentic _Italian _manufacture."

"That's important to you too, Columbina?" Jacopo carried on smoothly. "Do you prefer it, or is it just what's available?"

"No, I chose it." Columbina shook her head, again with that lovely shiver of her hair. "It feels nice, just right, fitting into a groove, like it was ordained that way." She said with an air of whimsy. "It's the _Fratelli_ Tanfoglio that makes the weapon, and that's just what we are!" Columbina grabbed her father's hand in a tight squeeze and looked towards with warm, wet, glistering eyes – which abruptly dried out when Felipo looked back across the table to her with an alarmed, angry hiss.

"You care for your father very much, don't you, Columbina?" Jacopo asked, his voice a little strange.

Suddenly meek and abashed, Columbina murmured, "Yes, I suppose I do." Her hands retreated to her espresso. A sip seemed to energise her. "It's why I'm here." She smacked her lips with freshly-renewed enthusiasm.

"You want to fight for your father then?" Jacopo asked. "Your impecunious father? Your father who was hooking people on ruinous drugs for his own gain? Your father who's not hesitating to throw his only daughter into the wringer to claw back some of his own folly?"

Felipo carried every blow with a grim, set face. Columbina nodded simply. "Yes. I want to help the world – and my father's part of it as much as anyone."

"Even though you might be killed?"

"I won't be killed."

"Even though you might be maimed?"

"I won't be maimed." There was no hesitation – she said it automatically and confidently.

Such courage! Such youthful self-assurance! She came from no exalted position but she had all the prepossession of the President – and that confidence would shortly shatter when exposed to the harsh reality of speeding lead.

Jacopo smiled widely, happy and satisfied. His patrons were going to _love _the family De Marchese.

"I think, then," Jacopo said, measuring his words to give them a settling sense of weight, "that we might be able to arrange a few occasions where you may demonstrate just that."

Jacopo let the portentous of his words sink in. Father and daughter gripped their hands together, openly this time, and gave each other tight, fierce, nervous smiles of anxious decision – final and certain, but no less worrying, like a skydiver pushing off into the void.

Jacopo's own smile was broad, wandering, and condescending. "Assuming that our course won't be interfering with your studies, little girl?" He said lightly.

"It's the summer," Agapita flashed a toothy, feral grin, "and school's out!"

* * *

(Continued)


	5. Chapter 5

The evening before the big day, Avise told Agapita to put on some outdoor clothes.

Agapita stopped fastening her bra and looked at her handler strangely. "We're not eating in the restaurant?" She said in a perturbed voice, expressed not so much as a question as a gangster's deepening lead pit of realisation that the brother who's stood by him ever since they were kids fighting in the street has ratted out the whole job to the pigs.

Avise grinned and hefted up a camo-pattern rucksack that you could guarantee had never been in any quartermaster's store. "No, dear – tonight, we shall dine _al fresco_."

* * *

It was only a short walk from the hotel to the park, a small but pleasant civic garden, surrounded by urban buildings but which muffled the heat and noise of the surrounding city with a perimeter of trees and blinking oleanders – an ordered square setting down stakes against those who'd charge in and overrun it with concrete, Avise thought. The grass was springy – bouncing on deep, proper soil, not merely a thin layer of turf –and neatly quartered by straight paths leading towards the statue of a local worthy at its centre, whose philanthropic munificence kept the drinking fountains at his feet burbling to this day. As it was a bright summer evening the place was busy even though it was midweek, with workers sauntering the scenic route home and fathers pulling out their families for picnics out of an effort to prove that they were not rutted in a routine, the irony it was those very same social expectations needling them to take advantage of the sun apparently passing them by. For his part, Avise's gaze ranged all around the park with a smile of satisfaction, content that all was right with the world; Agapita, however, was more guarded. She shortened her pace to almost a shuffle and hung a close step behind Avise's elbow, flicking her eyes over his shoulder warily and broadcasting "bodyguard" to all and sundry.

"Lighten up, Agapita," Avise chided his cyborg, swinging his rucksack around onto another shoulder with the movement forcing her away a step, "and don't be so tense. This _is _supposed to be pleasure before business."

"But there's no cover here," Agapita muttered sourly, pained that her concern for her handler's welfare was not being recognised and acted on to increase his protection, "and too many targets." She gave an askance glance at a boy playing with a Super Soaker, as if he was going to spray acid over the fratello.

"Ach, it's okay, Agapita, you're new, you just haven't acclimatised to crowds yet." Avise said this with a gentle and understanding smile to soothe his charge, but inwardly he frowned fiercely. He would have thought that the Technology Department would have already installed socialisation in the girl's conditioning: to leave her anxious and threatened by crowds was a glaring omission, especially seeing as the ability to operate in public and hide in plain sight was half of the point of cyborgs in the first place. This was a poor performance from the medics, and he would be sure to upbraid Belisario for it once the mission was over.

"I understand, sir," Agapita's twitched a nervous smile at her handler's attention, but its little twigs of limbs were only spasming around the bulk of the big fat frown that was sat on top of it, "but there still _could _be enemies about, it'd be remiss of me if I didn't keep aware of that. I stay alert so you don't have to!" There was an earnest entreaty to her voice, pleading to be let to work – not just to be useful, but to be useful _to Avise._

Avise beheld Agapita. As he took her in, he thought back to another case of intransigence that he'd had to contend with. Private Leo Ferri! God! Seditious little bastard. An actual communist, with _Das Kapital _clasped to his chest the way John Calvin must have drawn strength from his Bible – but whereas Calvin was fervent with zeal and inspiration (even if he was a heretic Protestant), Ferri was just a shrill squawking parrot: a horrid, moulting creature who had nothing to say and who said it too loudly. He'd wanted to "trade unionise the Army" – and had even said it straight to the then-Lieutenant Mancini when the new recruit was being introduced in his office – it took all of the austere and dignified model discipline inculcated into the young officer not to laugh in the private's face. No amount of ablution block-cleaning for giving his section commander backchat could dampen Ferri's revolutionary ardour that the Army's endemic culture of repression required radical militation – never mind that Corporal Santere was the son of a stevedore while Ferri was a university dropout. Fortunately Ferri's droning in the dormitories had isolated him from the rest of his fellow proletariat in the platoon – this was only a few years after the Iron Curtain was drawn back and most were just relieved to never have to contend with endless T-72s grinding up the fields and belching smoke and fire, or Red Brigades fixing bombs to their cars; Ferri's promise to bring it all back was far from welcome. Indeed, between his opinions and all the time he spent in the toilets "Shithead" was Ferri's colloquial appellation amongst his comrades. Consequently there had been little dissension when Avise had arranged it that, during a NATO exercise in Kuwait ("19th Province of Iraq" everyone said tiredly before Ferri had a chance to get it out himself), Ferri could "get lost" with a subtly-edited orienteering map and be left wandering the desert for a night. They'd picked him up the next morning, a heap of nerves, shivering from the cold and sniffling with terror about packs of jackals, and when he'd asked why no-one came to find him the platoon sergeant had shrugged and said, "Working Time Directive." Ferri behaved after that. Avise had put Leo Ferri's name into an internet search engine a few years back on a random impulse and found out that the Faithful Of Lenin was now the manager of a Fiat dealership; Avise had nodded, satisfied at the victory.

The recollection replayed in Avise's mind not because Agapita reminded him of Ferri in any way – far from it, for his cyborg did not in the least reflect that reprehensible reprobate – but rather precisely because it was unrelated, contrasting. Avise couldn't treat Agapita in the same way. He didn't _want_ to.

"Try to think of this as training, Agapita." Avise tried to parlay Agapita's disquiet into something more constructive.

"Oh, sir! You don't mean that I'm going to have to do circuits of this park all evening?" Agapita was dismayed.

Avise arched his eyebrows. At least it took her mind off of terrorists attacking her with Frisbees. "Not unless you want to, dear." He said lightly.

Agapita looked pained – she was only three weeks old but even she could elucidate an implicit statement. She _could _say no, but her handler's expectation was such that she grit and werewithal to not need the encouragement of an actual instruction to leap into action. "Certainly, sir, I'm on my way."

"Joking! Joking!" Avise clapped his hand down on Agapita's shoulder to pin her in place. _Good grief – she starts learning not to be so literalist and then she goes and gets the wrong end of the stick._ Avise thought with a shake of his head. He then steered her to an empty patch of grass and applied a little pressure to tell her to sit down. Agapita immediately descended vertically into a cross-legged position, folding up her legs neatly like a pre-assembled frame – at least her programmed dexterity worked with machined ease even if her head was still a little scattered.

"Think of it as espionage training, Agapita," Avise grunted as he tottered down into a sitting position himself, "an extension of disguises. You need a certain attitude to maintain yourself undercover. Petrushka can doll you up with enough foundation to turn you into a geisha and Kara can play with you like a Barbie—"

"More like a _Lenci, _knowing her and Michele." Agapita chuckled.

_What the Hell is a Lenci? _Avise started, Agapita's intervention disrupting his flow and accentuating his surprise. Not _quite _an IED in the street, but... _eh, whatever it is, if Pagani is involved it's probably something expensive. _Avise dismissed the matter with a shrug. "Well, be it Barbie, Cindy, _or '_Lenci', no costume she puts on you will be worth anything if you can't strut a pose that lets the folds hang right Or iron a sharp trouser-crease in time for inspection, for that matter.

"It's a question of comportment. You could be a spy in Afghanistan with a towel wrapped around your head, but if you didn't knock head at the right moment during prayers the Taliban would be on you faster than they would a goat's backside." Agapita blinked quickly a few times in mild astonishment at the vivid image, but remained quiet and attentive while Avise continued. "And it's a similar case here. You might not be able to see the enemy, but they may not notice you, either – unless you act so much like a cop you might as well have a penguin waddling along on a leash behind you." Avise smirked to himself, a little rival regimental ribbing between the Bersaglieri and the Carabinieri never going amiss. "Disguise is conveyed in your carriage as much as your clothes – and that's what I want us to practise here, okay?"

Agapita nodded in understanding. She looked about her for a moment. The trees rustled, caught and burred by the evening breeze skating across the top of the surrounding buildings. Droplets quavered in the air and pattered against the rough grain of the stone stoups of the drinking fountains. The grass crackled and crinkled with the footfalls of running children. Agapita turned her head to Avise. "Sir, is comportment another word for 'sitting'?"

"Wha—oh, yeah!" Avise cried aloud. He'd become so absorbed in imparting guidance to his ward that he'd forgotten what he'd brought Agapita out for in the first place. He began to rummage around in his rucksack, excavating a large bottle of water, and then a drab olive plastic pouch which he tore open and began to remove more items from.

Agapita peered critically at the accumulating assembly. A small stove; a pair of mess tins and racing spoons; two plain unlabelled cans - one had "BOLOGNESE" stamped on it, the other "CANNELLONI". "This is dinner." She said doubtfully.

"Indeed, dear, a special treat to celebrate your first mission - _Razione Viveri Speciali da Combattimento, _fresh from the shelf in the quartermaster's stores." Avise did not look up as he brought out his matchbox, not to light a cigarette this time but rather nose it about the small white blocks crumbled into the bed of the stove and coax a flame from them."Loaded with calories, perfect accompaniment to all your exercise tomorrow. Not only that" - Avise took the two cans and shook them like maracas before Agapita – "but you get a choice of two meals! Now isn't that just luxury?" He finished with a fierce grin.

Agapita was confused and not sure how to respond: she couldn't tell whether her handler was being facetious or making an error of judgement that it was her duty, as his extra set of eyes, arms and armour, to correct him on. Either way, the one thing that _was _sure was that it didn't look as if she was getting fed tonight. "I'll take the Bolognese."

Avise pouted for a moment, a little irked that the preferred course was being taken away from him, but he didn't pull rank to get it back. Wrapping the mess tin up with a sheet of tinfoil pulled from a side-pocket of the rucksack ("that gets sooty instead and saves on cleaning") and filling it with water, he placed it on the stove before pulling open slight air holes in the two cans and laying them down in it. "I prefer to eat straight from the can," Avise explained, "saves on cleaning again, and if you just protect your hands against the metal with your shemag it helps warm them up, too. It's really soothing on a cold morning."

_This is a warm evening, though_. Seeking to investigate more thoroughly this strange concept that her handler was evidently taken with, Agapita bent her head down to the grass to watch the green flame under the stove. It seemed incredible that what looked like dull, inert lumps of chalk could be a source of energy, and indeed the lime-coloured fire only seemed to blend out of the air and come into being some distance above the fuel blocks. It was as if there was a solid but invisible boundary between inaction and action, a metaphysical membrane which restrained the bright, bodiless vastness of energy and through which some seepage was being pressured out into this material world.

Avise watched his cyborg's rapt absorption quietly, until the water in the mess tin began to boil. He brought Agapita back down to Earth with the weight of a foil packet tossed at her. "_Ces sont hors d'oeuvres pour mon cher gastronome." _ He said with an affected accent, curling an imaginary moustache between his fingers. Agapita took the packet curiously and tore it open to reveal a stack of brown, dry crackers. Not quite _haute cuisine_, but she was feeling a little peckish waiting for the cans to finish off – and was surprised herself when the cracker was pulled into her mouth like an old computer grabbing a punch-tape. It had a full oat flavour, and a filling texture that masticated thickly on the tongue, and it was indescribably moreish. Avise made an appreciative noise as he saw his charge grind through the biscuits. "Best item in the bag," he smiled, "gums up your insides more than Turin at rush hour. You won't need the toilet for days."

Agapita choked on the last biscuit.

"Hey, don't look at me like that," Avise protested, "it's very useful. If you're lying doggo in the pouring rain for six hours" – _or sitting on a live landmine for eight – _"the last thing you need is to get caught short."

"But I'm not going to be lying doggo in the pouring rain for six hours, sir. I'm going to be playing in an actual deathmatch with a bunch of mercenaries – in Sicily at the height of summer." Agapita dearly hoped that this wasn't going to end up like the sad redundant busywork of the morning fitness training. She dearly loved Avise, but she didn't love some of the things that she had to do.

"Don't be cheeky." Avise hooked out the cans from the mess tin with his racing spoon and, wrapped one up in a shemag pulled from the rucksack before handing it to Agapita along with her own spoon. "_Buon appetito!_"

Agapita pulled the lid off of the can with her bare hand – a melange of starch and sauce glicked at her wetly. "Avise... you know what you were saying about disguise earlier..."

"Hmm? What of it?" Avise was churning down into his can with his spoon, chopping up the sausage-like rolls inside with the edge.

"Well, you see, everyone around us has their food in hampers or Tupperware, or they're cooking things on disposable barbecues. Doesn't eating from an Army rat-pack really single us out as abnormal?"

_...Clever girl. _Still, Avise fielded it neatly. "Don't worry, _Columbina_, this is all part of our cover. After all, your esteemed father is supposed to be a cashiered officer who was found out to be a drug dealer and had to spend every last _lira_, let alone eurocent, that he had in bribes to avoid a courts-martial and instead be invited to resign his commission. It'd make sense for him to be avoiding wining and dining in the restaurant like someone who still had an expenses account." Avise finished with the accomplishment of a mathematician scratching out a polynomial formula on the blackboard.

"But still, would he really have military rations to hand?" Agapita persisted.

"Oh, heaps and heaps," Avise waved his spoon through the air in a gesture visualising a towering mound of reconstituted product, "I do too. There's been a fair few times, even when at home, when I can just drop these into a pan and be done with it. I really hate cooking, you know." Avise jabbed his spoon towards Agapita to make sure that she did. "Hate it hate it _hate_ it. I actively resent how preparing and clearing away something so fundamental as a meal has to take up half the evening – it's the most tiresome chore." He lifted up a heaped spoonful of cannelloni from and took a wide, fulfilling mouthful from it. "I mean, I can _do _it, and do do – I still bull my boots, after all." Avise's gaze was starting to drift away from Agapita to wander in the middle distance, as if he was more justifying the niggling suggestion of indolence to himself than continuing the conversation with Agapita. "But still, I would never want to deprive the Catering team of a job, especially in modern straitened circumstances."

Agapita considered her handler's words with studied care – she was here to complement her master, to fit together like a jigsaw, a single unit, a fratello: perhaps there was something that could draw her closer to him? As she thought about it, she automatically began spooning up "BOLOGNESE" into her own mouth – and she widened her eyes into surprise when her lips slicked off the spoon. Despite that unpromising presentation... it tasted _really good_.

As the handler and cyborg continued to eat, Agapita felt a change steal over her, as if the warmth of the food in her stomach was stirring something within her to wakefulness. Everything about the evening – the evening before the big day – felt... _right_. The clatter of spoons against the side of their cans sounded like the squeak of nuts being tightened – with everything sealed and contained within her, a tremor of excitement quivered through Agapita, as if bolts were running home, and turbines spun up. Avise's unexpected announcement, to catch her out and raise her awareness; her alertness of the surrounding environment and observation of the people crowding it; her handler's education and instruction, and here, now, performing a soldierly activity – her frame of mind was clicking into place, the things expected of her condensing down from a vague fog to crystallised orders. The air she breathed was charged with a nerve agent to stir her to life. She settled into reassurance; primed herself with confidence; steeled herself with certainty.

Agapita was ready.

* * *

(Continued)


	6. Chapter 6

Italy is the fount of Western culture, and being freshened by the very source of civilisation her people have cottoned on a lot earlier than most others that a damp, cold, soggy, sloppy bowl is no way to start the day. Instead, they breakfast on something sugary, charged, bright and sweet, to set you skipping down the road with a spring on your step and a sunny smile.

…and then, there's coffee.

While Agapita pushed her finger around the rim of her plate to scoop up the last flakes of pastry from her rich and succulent_ pain au chocolat_, Avise was working one arm down the sleeve of his jacket, tipping up his coffee cup with his free hand. He shook it irritably when he found it to be empty – but Priscilla was immediately on hand with the urn.

"Oh, you're a saint." Avise breathed as he knocked back the entire cup in one long gulp, before setting the cup back down on the serving tray with a ceramic clatter of crockery.

"Aren't I just?" Priscilla said coolly, as she moved past the handler, accepting Agapita's plate back and smiling at the cyborg's thank-you.

"What brings room service up here, then?" Avise asked as he buttoned up his suit jacket and pawed his side to make sure that his Webley was not noticeable in its chest holster. "Are we aborting?"

"I never expected you of all people to shy away from a fight, _Major Mancini_!" Priscilla remarked, although a glint in her eye indicated that it was more gentle sarcasm than questioning surprise.

"Oh, I'm all for getting in the thick of it," Avise insisted, "I've just had some limpid commanders flop over me in my time." Avise's gaze twitched away momentarily and he looked at his reflection in the mirror above the room's dresser, a frown shadowing his face.

Priscilla noted the change in his demeanour with a blink of worry. "Well, never fear, Chief Lorenzo's nothing like that – as you should well know, Hero of Ablution Block B." Avise's head immediately snapped back to Priscilla, causing her to take a step back in instinctual alarm – but they both laughed.

"True, true…"Avise bent his head down to fasten his cufflinks, and as he did so, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. "…Agapita, are you putting on _lipstick_?"

Agapita was sitting on the edge of her bed, and she looked up from her compact with an expression of surprise. "It's lip gloss, sir." She held up the wand for inspection.

"Stick, gloss, balm, whatever. Why?"

Agapita glanced sideways, looking a little confused and uncertain. "Well, Jacopo did say that he wanted Gladiators to dress in smart street wear…" She lowered her hand to tug at the hem of her short dress self-consciously.

"I know, but we're going to be going to _battle _in _hours_ and…" – was it really all that different from smearing his face in camo paint? – "…it looks lovely."

Agapita pressed her lips together in a tight smile – it was a subtle effect, the gloss not changing the texture but altering the tone just so slightly from flesh to give her complexion that extra rim-glint of shine – and nodded vigorously. "Thank you, sir."

"Just wait until we're in the car next time, time is tight." Avise said as he turned away, feeling obliged to give an instruction of some kind. He brought himself back to Priscilla, who'd been watching the exchange with a smile herself. "And on the topic of time…"

"Yes." Priscilla smoothly slid into gear. "We wanted to make sure that you were not under observation so there was no convenient opportunity to tell you this beforehand, but Section One did sweep this room prior to your checking in and recovered a bug." She fished a long length of cable with a small grey burr of a microphone out of her pocket, and dribbled it into Avise's hand. "They'll be wondering why they only got static all evening – it's probably best to confront them about it, pretend you found it yourself, otherwise they may get suspicious about you having other support. "

"Thanks." Avise pooled the bug into his own pocket. "Speaking of which, it's probably best that you clear off now – you came to deliver our breakfast tray, and porters in a place like this would be too disciplined to gas with the guests. Don't want to make the tail in the lobby suspicious."

"Well, aren't you the expert." Priscilla tipped her head back.

"He had plenty of time to learn, you kept him waiting long enough for me!" Agapita piped up from the beds, where she was testing the action on her pistol.

Priscilla arched her eyebrows at Agapita's interjection – Avise shrugged non-committally at the support agent. "True enough!" Priscilla said lightly. "Best of luck, okay?" She thought for a moment. "And God bless."

"Thanks." Avise replied, and as the hotel room door clicked shut he turned back to Agapita – to be interrupted by the ringing of his mobile phone.

_Dee-lah-dee-dah, dee-lah-dee-dah, dee-lah-dee-dee-dee._

Both handler and cyborg jumped as the Nokia theme jangled off of the walls. Avise glanced at the screen – it was Jacopo's number. _So soon after Priscilla had left? _Had they been made?

…_dee-lah-dee-dee-dee._

With a flick of his head Avise directed Agapita to move into the bathroom – if any assassins were to come crashing in while Avise was distracted, she would be in a position to swing out the barrier and clothesline them. In the meantime Avise walked over to the far corner of the room, where he would not be seen in the room's window talking and helpfully standing still for any sniper in the neighbouring building.

…_dee-dee-dee._

Beep.

"_Ici chacal." _

"Eh? What?" Jacopo sounded confused.

_Huh._ The agent didn't sound like someone who was lining up a target. Avise permitted himself to relax a little. "Ah, sorry, Jacopo, it's Felipo De Marchese here. Just a little joke of mine, seeing as we're doing all this secret stuff, y'know."

"…the Jackal had police run him down, before you get too lost in your fantasy. We'd prefer to avoid that, Mr. De Marchese." Jacopo grated testily.

"Okay, okay, don't get your knickers in a twist." Avise sighed at the boring square. "Is this about our ride?"

"Indeed." Jacopo's tone became neutral and businesslike, keen for the efficient operation of the Gladiator Games' machinery. "There's a silver Mercedes-Benz CLS coupé, registration VT-994-DG, in row twelve of the car park. Knock five times on the top of the boot for entry."

"_Fancy_. You could never enjoy that sort of transport on a Ministry of Defence Travel Warrant, let me tell you." Avise smiled.

"Please don't be too long." Jacopo sighed.

"We're just packing now, checking out in minutes." Avise reassured the agent. "Nothing to compromise your agent's commission!"

"Thanks for your concern." Jacopo beaded out his words slowly and dryly. "See you in 'minutes', then."

Boop.

Avise puffed out a sigh. "False alarm, Agapita. You can stand down."

Agapita emerged from the bathroom. Avise was expecting her to be a little jittery from the sudden flush of danger, pulling sharp, nervous twitchy grins which he could flatten out with fatherly encouragement. To his surprise, though, Agapita appeared perfectly level and composed, as if nothing of interest had happened at all. "Are they keeping us alert, sir?" She asked as she shut the bathroom door behind her. _The conditioning at work._

"Very good of them to do so, saves me the bother of sending you to do ten laps of the block." Avise grunted. "Come on, game face on, girl, we need to get moving." He chivvied her back over to her suitcase on her bed.

Agapita picked up her pistol from where it rested on top of her clothes. She picked out a magazine from the case, and after weighing both weapon and ammunition in her hands for one considered moment of import, she slotted the magazine into the grip, pulled back the slide, and then sprang it forward to ready a round.

"Showtime."

* * *

Sicily is the ball, or scrunched-up rag, being kicked by the Italian boot – and, appropriately enough, it has seen its fair share of violence. It was the pivot about which Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans revolved in their dance of dreadful decades to determine in what language people would say "Our Sea"; where Archimedes turned his genius to the defence of the walls of Syracuse – featureless names lurching out of the mist of faded school and half-remembered history the way the black hulk of a tank will loom up through the fog of was the cauldron in which boiled the hot blood and distempered bile of Rome's slaves, blistering dissent long before Spartacus would inflict himself on history (or celluloid). The zeal of Islam would spread across the Mediterranean as pervasively and irresistibly as oil, and slick over Sicily to dry and harden into the iron harmony of the 'Religion Of Peace'; and the Normans would bring the bite of the Viking axe to scar the landscape. French were massacred to the stiletto whispering of Vesper prayers, and as if in penance for such sacrilege the pinched headlands of the Straits of Messina formed the needle which poisoned Europe with the Black Death. For centuries Sicily would be borrowed and betted and bargained as a chip of land on the European table – even when the island became the foundation of Garibaldi's edifice of Italian unification, the cornerstone was being laid by British mining interests while he span tales of his ragged Thousand Allied armies of the Second World War would twist their ankles in Sicily's stony ravines in a rude reminder that the road to Rome would be no Sunday stroll…

…and whenever there hasn't been any war on Sicily, the Mafia may always be trusted to apply the strain to that venerable tradition of tension. The potash mineral that veins Sicily's hills is the ruddy red of dried blood.

There is another, modern war being fought on the coast of Sicily, with the lines of its beaches and hills a new front of internecine strife – a war with destruction but no bloodshed – which robs it of at least the dignity of tragedy, and instead makes it pathetic and sad.

As the silver coupé climbed out of Ragusa, it threaded the tarmac stitching of road that weaved together the brilliant ultramarine blanket of the immaculate Mediterranean and the radiant golden skein of rich, ripening wheat – tarnished with ashen smears of abandoned concrete, speckles of shrapnel dimpling the cheek of Italia. An upmarket sporty vehicle like the Mercedes found it hard going through the streets of Agrigento, trundling up the narrow, steep streets of peeling stucco walls, sweltering bin-bags and flaccid, dangling, enervated electricity cables more like a plodding trek than an easy drive, but the density and dirtiness of the ancient and decrepit town was like a bath, a purge, to scrape off all the accumulated grime of the journey by rubbing against Agrigento's cracked walls and emerge above it, cleansed, into the Valley of the Temples: the heights above the crushed lower strata where grace and serenity still meditated in the shade of timeless, immortal ages.

The car drove straight past it into the next valley beyond.

The concave hills dropped steeply to flatten out into a broad band between the shore and the heights – but the band was not a ribbon to beautify the landscape, but a fetter to shackle it down. The entire breadth of the coastal plain was occupied with construction, square cubes and oblongs of concrete, dusted with sand, to make the entire scene appear like a rubbish heap of used cardboard boxes. But the buildings were as still and empty as opened boxes as well, folded out and useless – while Sicily's desperately poor rural population saw the construction as a flood of relief, providing cheap housing free of punitive rents, others inveighed against it as _abusivismo,_ construction's concrete imperialism, possessing the countryside with illegal building that could not be removed after the fact of its raising, defacing the remarkable beauty of the landscape – the gravest offence to an Italian's refined aesthetics – and grinding up millennia of buried history underneath shovelling diggers. Developers cited supplying a demand; critics decried profiteering. Builders insisted on the need for employment; detractors sneered about corrupt government _appalti _contracts. Mayors and councillors proclaimed on promoting social harmony and supplying vital services to the citizens who elected them; journalists muttered about mafia laundering and brown envelopes. Cranes built up; bulldozers smashed down. And, this being Italy, each round of ripostes would be punctuated by protestors hurling bricks at the residents, the residents smashing placards through the protestors, and police thrusting riot shields and firing baton rounds to smash the noses and crack the ribs of both.

Eventually, a decree was passed down from Rome ordering the building to halt, for the cranes to come down. The protestors cheered – and faltered when no order for the bulldozers to advance followed.

So the estate remained, half-finished, a landscape of jagged walls and opened roofs, cratered with half-dug foundations, with stacks of bricks and breeze-blocks left to slump out and crumble as the wooden pallets underneath them rotted. Occasionally, a strip of tarpaulin or plastic sheeting could be seen fluttering from the corner of the empty shell of a building, like a ragged curtain of a bombed-out bedroom, their lonely snapping in the wind only emphasising the desolate silence of the rest of the expanse. As the car climbed past the unfinished estate to the top of the hills, it tracked past their windows like a shelled city in a television documentary. A deliberate ruin – a _literal_ folly – to the mutual dissatisfaction, failure, and unfulfilment of everyone.

* * *

"Wind your window up."

"Why?"

"Because we're almost there, this can't roll in like some granddad ambling along the _corsia della vergogna_"

"The 'lane of shame'? I would have thought you'd want your boss-"

"Patron."

"-_Patron _to see you going slowly. A flash car like this, I doubt he'd want one of his agents roaring off in top gear and getting it smashed up."

"No wonder they threw you out of the Army if you can't take a simple instruction. Just do as I tell you!"

"But I'm finishing my cigarette."

"Then _stub it out_!"

* * *

The car turned past a pair of gateposts (with no gate), and after a few hundred yards driving along a road fringed on each side with small, wiry brush and scrub it emerged onto a wide, circular cul-de-sac with four large villas looking out towards the coast – originally envisaged as luxury homes but which now had their value completely crushed by the abandoned estate defacing the view – maybe whoever commissioned this particular development hadn't tipped well enough.

The location actually appeared quite busy – one of the villas was densely clustered with people, and a dozen other cars were parked in the cul-de-sac or pulled up onto driveways, and there were even a pair of black Hum-Vees (not civilian Hummers, Avise noted with surprise, actual military models) sitting between a Maserati GranTurismo on the one hand and a Lancia Delta on the other, like foxes nervously bunkering down between the sheep and knowing that they're obvious to the gaze of the shepherd. There was even a Eurocopter Super Puma II, looking as though it had plenty of doeskin leather upholstery inside, set down on a flattened patch of ground off to the side of the road.

"This is all a little… _obvious,_ isn't it?" Agapita leaned across from her seat behind the driver to tap Jacopo on the shoulder as the car purred softly to a halt like a cat curling up for a nap.

"But of course, Miss. Columbina," Jacopo said, his mood improving now that they had arrived and that his crucial responsibility was now discharged, "this is the official meeting of the Agrigento province's redevelopment syndicate, after all."

"But that's not true." It was an obvious thing to say, but Agapita meant it that _anyone _would have seen through the obvious deception.

"It's what the police have been told, and these upstanding public citizens are natural law-abiding models for others to emulate, so who would think to question it? Hiding in plain sight!" Jacopo said knowledgeably, handing down a lesson to the young novice.

Agapita and Avise threw askance glances across each other. "…I can relate." She said, blandly.

The driver remained in the car. After retrieving their bags from the boot of the coupé the fratello followed Jacopo over to the occupied villa. As they approached, a suited man stepped in their way. "Excuse me, Miss. Columbina?"

Agapita nodded. "Yes, that's me."

"Thank you. Could you come with me, please? The Competitor's Lounge is in a different building." Although the man pronounced his words with a soft, received burr that spoke of fine elocution, he couldn't be said to be anything like a cultured and poised valet; he still had the broad shoulders and the tellingly loosely-cut jacket which betrayed an armed guard.

Agapita spun back to Avise – but this time, the handler remained stern. "Game face on." He said, simply and levelly. Agapita's expression settled: she nodded quickly, and moved away with the guard, pulling her rolling suitcase behind her. "_Is all of your equipment in your suitcase there? Do you need a porter?" "No, I've no other luggage." "Very good, Miss…"_ The voices faded away with the trundling of wheels across the tarmac.

Avise watched them go, and even though the man was to Jacopo no more than a chit for a commission fee to be redeemed upon presentation to his patrons, an invisible hand exerted an ineffable force to hold the agent back from pushing the client forward. Jacopo scraped at the ground and scowled at his feet, trying to shake out the itch that was suddenly running between his shirt and his shoulders. Damnit, how _do _you be sympathetic? He couldn't say how it would feel, but he had that social expectation that sending your offspring to fight ought to make you feel something. Clumsily, jerkily, as though he was pausing every now and again to check the diagrams in an accompanying manual, Jacopo reached out an arm to touch it down gingerly on Avise's shoulder, as though the client's flesh was sore and tender and the agent didn't want to hurt him – or alternatively, as if Jacopo was worried that there were hooks in the fabric of Avise's jacket that would bite and tear into him if he pressed fully. "Do you need a minute before we go in?" Jacopo asked quietly.

"No…" Avise's words were at first wandering, vacant, but he seemed to settle and deepen his tone quickly. "No, no, it's alright. _War can never be avoided, only postponed to the other's advantage._ No time like the present. " Avise stepped forward, and Jacopo's hand slid back off of his shoulder as he walked.

* * *

"This is the Competitor's Lounge, a communal area where the Gladiators gather before the match." The guard explained as he led Agapita down an empty hall. "Conduct any last preparations you have in here. You will be called for when it is time to move to your start position."

The guard came to a large door, and opened it without announcement before waving Agapita through into the room beyond.

Ten heads swivelled like tank-turrets and ten pairs of eyes narrowed to red-dot laser sights to mark Agapita as she entered the room.

"Uh... hi."

Agapita waved.

"My name's Columbina."

The silent scrutiny continued. Agapita wondered if this was how a fighter pilot felt when his alarm rang "TARGET LOCK"... but, like a fighter pilot with the technological marvel of his craft, a conditioned cyborg had countermeasures that she could deploy. The sense of hostility and threat was actually beneficial to her, allowing her conditioning to lock into place and concentrate her thoughts, clarify her perspective: sloughing away girlish anxiety and replacing it with steely resolve.

The room was large and wide, stretching across what seemed like most of the rear half of the villa, and while the rest of the building was completely unfurnished, with bare walls and floors, this one by contrast was fully fitted. Agapita was standing on an upper section, with a glass dining table to her right and a bar to her left – although the shelves were completely empty, one man was behind it, drinking glasses of water from a working tap. Four short steps in front of her leading down to a broad lounge area across which were a dozen easy armchairs, which Agapita assumed signified the number of Gladiators who would be participating in the match. The rear wall was comprised entirely of tall plate glass looking out over the unfinished estate down towards the coast. Squinting a little, Agapita could espy a white motor cruiser moored at a pontoon leading from the shore – and, further out, a slowly-trawling fishing vessel where Elio and Marisa, one of the interdiction fratelli, were stationed.

There were ten other people here – seven men and three women, with a variety of colours and complexions that spoke of an international assembly – which meant at least that Agapita wasn't the last to arrive (Avise's enthusiasm for punctuality was obviously rubbing off on her). One was at the bar, two were staring out over the vista below them, three were relaxing – napping, clicking through an iPod list, reading a copy of _Jane's Defence Weekly_ – while the rest were bombing up handgun magazines or assembling their weapons.

And all were silent.

No sense of camaraderie and sportsmanship here, then, or any sense of shared burden against the oppression of the patrons even, or even pride in the sheer achievement of winning, participating, or surviving. There didn't even seem to be any jealousy or resentment, or bravado or bluster, which would be the least things you'd expect when sitting next to be people who could be killing you within the hour. It was evident to Agapita that for these people, the money was all that mattered. That seemed a little sad.

Lifting up her suitcase so that its wheels would not bang on the steps and disrupt the quiet, Agapita walked over to an empty chair and took her place there without any further comment. She unzipped the case, and the first thing she did was to pull on her black shooting gloves, before removing half a dozen pre-loaded magazines and slipping them into pockets sewn into her denim jacket. She had already prepared her pistol back in the hotel this morning, but for the sake of something to do as much as conduct a final check, she unloaded and reloaded it again. Throughout this, Agapita could detect a constant twitching of the heads of the other gladiators, continuing to size her up and estimate her potential, every last gesture a source of intelligence for people determined to snatch the barest whispering sliver of an edge over their rivals. It seemed remiss of Agapita not to return the favour of such indirect respectful recognitions of power and potential, and with her cybernetic eyes she could identify the other gladiators' eclectic mixture of personal handguns out of the corner of her eyes without even having to move her head.

The door to the lounge opened again, and a small, furtive-looking man scurried in – this time, the guard (the same one who had escorted Agapita) followed him.

"Ryba Sedlacek!" He called out. One of the women stood up and with no more than a second's clatter to fix a holster around her waist, walked over to the guard and went back out with him, leaving a satchel at the foot of her chair. Even though it was unattended luggage, no-one took any interest with it, Agapita thought with relief – the idea of someone rooting through her suitacase and laughing at her underwear while looking for valuables seemed to Agapita a lot more frightening than being shot at.

What else to do? Her conditioning kept her at readiness, erasing fear and anxiety and even boredom, but attentiveness still needed something to attend to. Almost without realising it, Agapita found herself mouthing words under her breath.

_Our Father who art in Heaven..._

_Hallowed be thy name..._

Agapita still wasn't sure about the whole God thing. If Avise set such stock in it it had to be true, of course, but nonetheless Agapita followed her handler's lead through the ritual rather than taking anything from it herself. She had just come to realise, though, that prayer could fill the empty spaces in life, and even make silence seem full.

* * *

"Oh, my." The elderly woman, every un-Metric inch an English marm right up to her blue rinse, raised her hands to her cheeks as she saw the Webley in Avise's outstretched hands. "It's _just _the sort of thing that my husband, God rest his soul, used in Borneo! Brings back memories." She finished with a wistful sigh.

Avise felt a twinge of envy in his stomach at the woman's words, imagining grand colonial adventures in far-flung exotic climes that no Italian had had the privilege of setting forth on… he consoled himself with the thought that however many destinations Britain's khaki-coloured travel agency reached in the past, the firm had most definitely shut up shop now.

Another man standing nearby twitched open his jacket, revealing the grip of a Desert Eagle. "Mine's bigger." He smirked.

Avise shrugged as he slid the Webley back into his jacket, nodding at the woman nattering amiably about the monsoon and how while she adored the _bel paese_ of Italy, perhaps an occasional lick of rain wouldn't go amiss. The "Executive Box", as it had been described to him, was similar in outlay to the Competitor's Lounge in the adjoining villa, albeit significantly busier – there were between thrity and forty spectators, mostly Italian but with seven or eight obvious foreigners, along with a (stocked) bar and side-tables of finger food, as well as several large televisions set up across the lounge area and a veranda outside the windows. There was a hubbub of conversation, all of it sounding entirely natural and genial, with the various circles of dialogue all spread evenly across the room and not clenched into little factional clusters. Maybe this was why they let the patrons carry firearms – a little mutually-assured-massacre would soothe temperaments.

"De Marchese, is it?"

Avise turned to the sound of the voice, and a middle-aged man – a little portly, but not grossly overweight by any means – with a glass of red wine in one hand approached Avise.

"I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage, _chevalie_." Avise bowed his head, adding his title as he noticed the ribbon above the breast pocket indicating the bearer's knighthood. The word tasted bad on Avise's tongue – it sounded like so much of an anachronism – but he conceded that such titles were awarded by the Republic for merit, which made them more acceptable.

"Why, I am Giorgio – the Master of Ceremonies." Giorgio sounded astonished that anyone could think otherwise. He switched his glass to his left hand and then offered his hand to Avise, which Avise took. Giorgio spoke as they shook. "Tell me, Mr. De Marchese, what's your ancestry?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Your genealogy."

"I, uh… I don't have one, as far as I'm aware. I think an aunt did family tree stuff casually." Avise shrugged his shoulders.

Giorgio frowned slightly, as though Avise wasn't getting into the spirit of things and spoiling the mood. "Come now, a "De" in your surname at least indicates someone of landed significance. How far can you trace back your family tree?" The sentence ended on an insistent note.

"No further than my granddad, I'm afraid." Avise said helplessly. "I'm not all that keen on nobility." He added flatly.

Umberto seemed dissatisfied at an interesting line of conversation being cut off, but after a second's consideration he saw a new avenue to open up a dialogue on. "I must say, I was quite impressed by your speaking to Mrs. Ethergill there – " Giorgio's Italian flow couldn't quite cope with the Saxon pronunciation, and it came out as _Effergheel _– "you show some impressive English."

"أستطيع أن أتكلم المساعي العربية وكذلك." Avise replied.

"Ah! A dash of exotic flair!" Giorgio declaimed enthusiastically. "Of…?"

"I can speak good Arabic as well." Avise explained, tactfully passing over how the Master Of Ceremonies did not evidently enjoy full control of everything. "You need decent knowledge of both languages to command effectively in Iraq." Avise's pride in his military achievements was coming out again, the expanding girth of his ego pushing out at his belt.

"I'd imagine so, yes." Giorgio nodded respectfully. "I'm pleased to see that soldiers became involved. You here lots of stories about soldiers never even looking over the walls of their bases."

"Sadly true in a few cases," Avise gritted his teeth, remembering the simpering Colonel Mottro, "but not mine."

Giorgio was quiet for a moment as he reviewed Avise's changed demeanour – a short second's pause, during which Avise noted that a number of nearby patrons were quietly and discreetly watching the chief of the operation converse with the newcomer.

Giorgio recovered quickly and moved off in another direction, the consummate host ever able to keep people occupied in gainful conversation. "I'm informed that you used to be a drug dealer, is that correct?"

Several people raised their eyebrows, Avise amongst them – it was a rather delicate matter to be nonchalant about. "Er, yes. That is correct, _chevalie_." Even though Avise wasn't altogether keen on the title he hoped that mentioning it would remind Giorgio of the importance of decorum. No such luck, however, as Giogrio split his face into a sharp grin.

"Excellent! Admirable!"

Avise blinked, baffled. "Really?"

"Oh yes." Giorgio nodded enthusiastically. "I applaud your entrepreneurial spirit, of seeing an opportunity and seizing it. You must understand," Giorgio gestured with his wine glass towards the wider world, "that one day, _all _drugs will be legal. Pot, crack, smack – they won't be slang, they'll be _trademarks_. Prohibition, in all of its well-meaning intransigence, will batter itself to bloody ruin against the brick wall of demand, and once it's smashed itself saner heads will prevail." Giorgio took a deep sip from his glass. "You're part of a new wave of business – it's merely an unfortunate accident of timing that put you a little ahead of the curve, that's all."

Avise reflected on this. "Are you involved yourself, _chevalie_?" He asked quietly.

"_Me?_" Giorgio laughed brashly. "God, no! I'd never touch the stuff. It's poison, it does nothing but screw you up." The Master of the Order of Merit for Labour took another drink from his wine, and coughed through the alcoholic burn as he began speaking again. "But – _but _– if someone wants to give me money to go and turn his brains into a frazzle, who am I – an equal member of this Republic – to question him, to infringe upon a citizen's intrinsic right to liberty?"

"Ask, and ye shall receive." Avise muttered.

"Haha! Quite so!" Giorgio laughed enthusiastically, although whether it was at the idea of a joke or him feeling flattered by a comparison Avise couldn't discern. "I'm glad you're here, Mr. De Marchese." There was that slightest strain on Giorgio's voice that was disappointed that the 'Mr.' wasn't something grander. "It isn't common to invite clients to come amongst the patrons, but you are very interesting. I know it was the right choice. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm afraid that I must go press the flesh." He pumped his right hand tiredly and gave Avise the wan smile of a shared burden before moving back into the crowd. Rather ingratiating chap, that Giorgio.

Avise turned around, quickly enough to catch others looking in on the conversation hurriedly avert their gazes. Even though it seemed that Giorgio had brought Avise into the inner circle precisely to be decorative (Section One's behavioural specialists, putting their heads together with Doctor Bianchi, had indeed come up with the goods), the rest of the gathering seemed content to look, but not touch. Avise wasn't approached again, and he spent half an hour grazing through finger food and lapping at orange juice. As he looked about him, studying the constituents of the gathering, he felt himself stirred by a warming of… _awe_. Real awe. These people were creators, directors, drivers, doers. Their wealth was a condensed crystal droplet of the wealth of Italy, and the prosperity of hundreds of thousands – millions, even – revolved on their determination and ingenuity. These people were the pivot about which society revolved – how could Avise not admire them? With a mournful sigh, he knew that it was a pity, a genuine pity, that he was here to demolish them.

Avise was interrupted from his reverie by the single ring of a large bell – although it definitely wasn't piped, he couldn't see from where. A sudden hush fell over the patrons, every one of them recognizing its import.

As if it was rehearsed choreography, people drew back towards the edges of the room, leaving an open circle of carpet at the focus of which stood, quite unassuming, Giorgio.

"I am Giorgio." He said, simply.

A pause.

"My friends and partners, welcome to what is perhaps the finest Colisuem boasted by the whole Gladiator Games. Now that you have had an opportunity to inspect the stables" – the televisions had been showing camera feeds of the Competitor's Lounge, which now lay empty as the last gladiator had been taken to his start position down on the abandoned estate – "I shall now take your bets."

There was a few second's silence, and then with sudden decision, a hand shot up.

"One on Hachimaki."

Giorgio nodded. "Very good." He said, writing the bet down in his notebook.

Avise gave a sharp intake of breath. Incredible… to be bathed in such splendid, stupendous affluence that amounts did not even have to be counted – millions were dispensed with casual numbers.

Another hand was raised. "One on Sedlacek."

"Two on Montio."

"Another one for Sedlacek, please."

Giorgio seemed to be intimately acquainted with everyone present, writing down the bets without even raising his head from the notebook – he seemed to be able to identify the speakers solely by voice.

"Three on Cessnare."

"One on Vitio."

"Four on De Marchese."

A chorus of gasps rippled across the room, and someone elbowed Avise in the back with what he assumed was matey encouragement. Avise turned his head back to hopeful faces and gave them weak smiles, which seemed to please them.

"Oh?" Giorgio asked.

"I'm confident on beginner's luck." The better explained.

"Naturally." Giorgio accepted the better's reasoning without question, it being the Master of Ceremonies' place to facilitate, not confound.

The betting continued. "Two on Hachimaki."

"Five on Rudelski."

"Fifteen on Al-Farid!" Mrs. Ethergill suddenly declared, blurting out a shrill siren.

More gasps. Even Giorgio raised his eyebrows. "Fifteen whole Euros? You wouldn't happen to know something that we do not, would you, _Messuz Effergheel?_"

For a moment Avise was taken with the crowd's astonishment, but then one detail caused Avise to crack and splinter off. "Wait a second." He called out.

A snake of irritation coiled around Giorgio's cheeks at being interrupted, but it slithered down behind his neck. "Yes, Mr. De Marchese?"

"You said fifteen Euros."

"That is correct, yes." Giorgio nodded slowly and patiently, explaining an elementary detail to a small child.

"Not…" Avise suddenly felt very stupid with everyone's eyes focused on him, "…fifteen… hundred thousand?"

Uncomprehending looks.

"I mean, uh… one and half million?"

Suddenly a babbling stream of giggles and murmured comments circled around the room, and Giorgio shook his head. "No, Mr. De Marchese, the esteemed lady means fifteen euros and zero cents. A little over nineteen U.S. dollars, or, in deference to madam's preferred exchange, twelve pounds sterling. No bet can be higher than twenty Euros, while we're on the subject."

Avise felt his cheeks colour, his hackles rising and his short temper fraying at the perception that he was being made the butt of a joke that everyone was in on except him. "Are you telling me, _chevalie_," he started hotly, not able to keep the angry, accusatory tone out of his voice, "that the stakes here, with where we are, all that's been prepared, and everyone around me, are no more than… than… _pocket change_?"

"But of course." Giorgio shrugged. In comparison to the handler's beating wings of indignation, Giorgio was at perfect ease. "This is an _elevated_ pastime that you are witnessing, Mr. De Marchese, nothing so crude and vulgar as a gambling den. If I want _that_, I can board my cruiser and sail to Monaco. No, this is an _intellectual _exercise." Giorgio raised a finger to enunciate a point, and people's heads began bobbing and nodding, as the gathering reclined in satisfaction at their sophistication. "It is a battle not merely over swollen largesse, but of wits and perception. We pit our powers of observation and evaluation against each other – the money is merely an indicator of the level of confidence we hold in our selected Gladiators. The stakes are the very faculties which we rely upon to endure in this, sometimes hostile, world."

Avise looked about him in astonishment. "You mean… people are being killed… for _kudos_?"

Giorgio chuckled. "What, would you prefer that they were being murdered for money? How terribly mercenary and immoral."

Warm waves of gentle laughter lapped against Avise, and he stepped back with a dissatisfied grunt. Although, come to think of it, it made sense… not having large sums shifting about would avoid questions from the taxman, and it also seemed to be a reason why the Master of Ceremonies was happy to let the patrons play with noisy toys, Avise thought as he picked out the man who had shown him the Desert Eagle earlier – less incentive to, aha, spoil the bet.

Giorgio brought the session to a close after having gone round the room. "I believe that is everyone, then—"

"Ah, beg your pardon, _chevalie,_ but after we spoke you never asked for my bet." Avise thrust his hand up. "I'd like to put ten on Torreil."

For the first time Giorgio looked genuinely lost, and other patrons were exchanging confused looks. "Not your daughter?" The question was naked.

Avise shrugged. "Nah. Torreil's fine." Inwardly, he felt a mischievous grin scamper about behind his face. He wondered how that would skew some predictions.

* * *

Agapita paced irritably around her start position – a painted square of fifteen feet to a side which a camera mounted on the ceiling admonished her not to leave until the match had begun. She was on the middle floor of a half-finished five-storey apartment block, which had jacked-up floors supported by central load-bearing pillars, but no actual walls, giving the place something of the air of a multi-storey car park. She was impatient to get going now, but her earpiece (given to her so that she would receive match updates) still droned with the Master of Ceremonies repeating the rules for the benefit of the patrons observing from the villa above them.

"…one hundred rounds of ammunition, but exhausting his supply does not permit a Gladiator to retire from the match. He must pick and conserve his shots, or collect weapons discarded by other, defeated Gladiators. This is a standard freestyle match, and so Gladiators may be killed as well as forced to surrender. A gladiator may surrender at any time he is in combat by dropping to his hands and knees and throwing his weapon behind him, at which point the victor may approach and collect a marker from him. Any gladiator firing on a victor in the process of this, or a defeated gladiator leaving the playing area, will be seen as dishonourable and sacrifice all of his markers. The last man – or indeed, woman – standing shall enjoy the laurels of the championship!"

The earpiece buzzed with static for a moment, which Agapita assumed was background applause. She wondered if she could somehow discern Avise's voice through the din.

"And now, I am pleased to introduce your loyal servants, and noble sportsmen!" Giorgio cried, his relish obvious even through the muffling of the radio. "First to the grid is Elio Turreil, returning back to the arena after a long absence, ready to school these young bucks that have appeared in the interim and teach them to respect their elders. He brings with him a Walther P99 – nothing showy, but as a man of his experience knows, efficiency trumps extravagance, and the hit is all that matters."

Agapita looked out and squinted, trying to see if she could see someone shifting about in response to his name being called. Giorgio announced the next Gladiator.

"Second in number, although certainly not in prowess, is Dylan Cromber. A former member of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police – and I ought to stress 'former'. Canadians have a reputation for gentleness and kindness – but this man here certainly has not earned it! He wields a Colt Anaconda with .44 magnum rounds – a beast of a hand-cannon that brooks no misinterpretations: the bear has scented your blood!"

Agapita couldn't help but feel a little curious as to how Giorgio would introduce her, and pouted a little when he declaimed and declared his way down the list without mentioning her – she took consolation in the thought that he was saving the best until last.

"I hope that everyone can extend their warmest of congratulations to Ryba Sedlacek, who returns to us after recently successfully passing her playoff round – patrons should admire, and gladiators should beware, her irrepressible determination! Coupled with that determination is an indefatigable pride, for she brings with her country's finest, the CZ-75, said by many to be the greatest handgun ever crafted. Yet a weapon is only ever as good as its wielder – fortunate, then, that Sedlacek is a veteran!

"And now we come to Columbina De Marchese." Agapita felt her throat tighten. "Least in ranking, least in age, least in experience... but least in _prowess_? That, my friends, is another matter _entirely_. A splendid and peerless paragon of selfless filial piety, the very barrel of her Tanfoglio TA-90 inscribed with the close, unbreakable bond she shares with her beloved father – but is such a weapon derivative of Sedlacek's Czech masterpiece, or a superceding _evolution_? We shall see – love may conquer all, but bullets certainly help!"

The Master of Ceremonies was veritably bounding into his role – Agapita could tell that he was speaking with all of the relish and bombast of a prizefighting announcer (how? She'd never even seen a boxing match before).

"Now…"

Let's get ready to ruuuuuummmbbblllleeee?

"…begin."

Huh.

With a shrug, Agapita wrapped her pistol in a two-handed grip and paced over to the edge of the floor to look out over the estate. After a second sweeping the nearby rooftops, none of which were higher than her level, she saw a man emerge a couple of buildings over, presumably searching for vantage himself. Agapita could identify him as Piotyr Rudelski – and Rudelski could see her right back.

There was the barest flicker of light from Rudelski's position, and then the snap of a report, sounding bizarrely like someone flicking their finger against a sheet of paper. Agapita skipped lightly over to the external staircase leading down to ground level, not showing her assailant any concern – at a range of 38.4 metres she knew she was well beyond the effective range of the Browning that Rudelski carried – without walls to the building that she was in, she wasn't struck by so much as an echo – and got the gladiator to waste a decent nine rounds before passing out of sight.

* * *

Some blocks away, Elio Torreil winced as he heard the faint fringe of the pistol reports brush against the borders of his hearing. Really, fights elsewhere ought to be encouraging – leaving fewer people for him to deal with – but he knew that for all of their talk, the patrons were here for a good show above anything else; simply surviving would not be sufficient. He hurried his pace down the middle of the gravel street – and immediately checked it when Al-Farid skidded on from a turning ahead of him. The two men did a take as they beheld each other, appalled at the encounter – and then they started firing.

It was a chance encounter, and surges of adrenalin and panic made their fire wild and frantic; not so much firing as blazing, and not so much pumping as spraying. The pair conducted a bizarre spastic shuffling dance, trying to dash into the cover of the ditches or walls beside the road, only to skip back into the centre as bullet kicked up plumes of dirt around their feet – it might almost have been seen as a tribal ceremony, or an animals' courtship ritual, as the pair unloaded their magazines at each other. With the last round in his chamber, however, Torreil pitched a hit into Farid's ankle – with a smack of meat Farid somersaulted through the air, with almost gymnastic extravagance, before crashing heavily into the dirt.

"I'm _dooooooooone!_" Faird wailed, his arms flailing, throwing his pistol away with such force that it bounced off of a wall.

Torreil tried to conceal his perspiring panting by twisting his mouth into a smile, as cheers of "First blood!" buzzed in his earpiece. He afforded himself a slow saunter over to the whimpering, cursing Farid to claim a marker from him. Not a bad start.

* * *

Agapita heard the announcement in her own earpiece, but didn't pay it any mind – if anything, she was tempted to pull the thing out and throw it away because it was interfering with her hearing, but she didn't want to risk being disqualified on a technicality. Even as she padded along the opened upper floors of a long terrace block, though, twenty separate dwellings now forming one long corridor, she could still hear the ragged, straggled, dispersed skirmishes of knots of gladiators scattered across the estate. A crackle like a campfire here; a suddenly-close bang there; the whirr of an observational camera refocusing here; a spatter of pops there; and then, footsteps, running up the stairs behind her—

Hachimaki and Agapita's pistol both jerked back sharply and simultaneously, as though they were both siblings who had just had their heads banged together by an irate father. As the dual report echoed off of the walls, Hachimaki seemed to... loosen. He swayed backwards with languid ease, his body rolling with the fluid wave of a water-bed, his head swinging around and lolling back loosely on a well-oiled ball-joint. He drifted back into a concrete bedroom, when his head slumped forward onto his chest and then suddenly tipped backward, shifted by some wonky internal centre of gravity, the gangly motion giving him the swinging momentum to fling him against the wall. Despite the deceptive sluggishness of the movement, Hachimaki's skull struck the wall with force and cracked apart like an eggshell against the edge of the bowl, and Agapita watched wordlessly as his body slithered down and tipped onto its – no longer his – side.

Agapita blinked. There was a ragged-edged border marking out an absent half of the gladiator's head – its contents slumped out in a single, smooth, viscous curve, pink brain mixing with red blood to give the gel a bright blended quality, as though some internal luminescence was shining through it.

"...?"

Agapita realised that her earpiece was addressing her.

"Well, Miss. Columbina. Sixteen years old and you have claimed your first victim. Tell me" – the voice was practically licking its lips with theatrical relish – "what does it feel like to be a killer?"

"It's..."

Synapse pathways were shut off to configure emotional response. Glanding of Compound V stabilised adrenal disorientation while a substitute charge of Syetterzine maintained the comfortable burn. Motor processes calmed her breathing. Didactic associations neutralised trauma memory. Dopamine surged.

"...great."

"_It feels great!"

* * *

_

(Continued)_  
_


	7. Chapter 7

"Killing feels _great_…?" Giorgio tapped his earpiece out of 'transmit' mode and turned around from the television screen to look towards Avise, who was in amongst the other guests. "Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, eh?"

"Rich fruit indeed." Avise intoned, lifting his head back to look down at Giorgio cryptically. There was a smattering of laughter surrounding Avise, but it had a strained quality – the handler could easily tell that the sight on the screen and Agapita's energetic affirmation had unnerved many of the spectators. They had welcomed 'Columbina' to the Gladiator Games, but that was because they'd expected her to be a novelty who could have amused them all with the funny floppy dance of a fish out of water; but this had been the crocodile leaping up onto the bank and savaging the sightseers. Even Giorgio's eyes had a searching, questioning quality that did not match the light tone that he had affected in his speech; he was inspecting Avise for signs that he was not telling all. "She's very dedicated, been psyching up for this for months." Avise shrugged noncommittally to the room.

Giorgio glanced around the room and turned back to one of the televisions with sudden decision; the Master of Ceremonies had evidently decided that it would not be conducive to a good show to let his audience brood on the matter. A whispered, inaudible command into his earpiece and the views of the televisions switched to multiple angles of a trio of Gladiators all within arm's length of each other but who apparently had no idea of the others' presence – two lurking on either side of a building corner while the third was backed up in the crook of the 'L' to catch a breather. The situation immediately provoked genuine laughter which Giorgio immediately began hamming up with some pantomime capering.

As a few patrons laughingly cried "It's behind you!" and "Oh no it isn't!" Avise thought about the scene that he had just witnessed. Curiously, he felt no strong emotion about Agapita making her first kill, of crossing the thresholds from civilian to soldier, and then soldier to fighter. It was in part familiarity – he'd seen others through this process, and had experienced it himself- but even so, given Agapita's unique situation and her relationship to Avise the handler wondered whether he _ought_ to have responded in a more sensitive or expressive way. All there was, though, was the gentle burr of quiet satisfaction behind his eyes that everything was as it should be – that all was going according to plan.

Avise was yanked out of his reverie by the sudden switching of the scene back to a view of Agapita and a flurry of excited shouting from Giorgio – suddenly more animated with the prospect of something jucier than before. Avise tightened his jaw. That was the thing about plans – none ever survive the first contact.

* * *

Agapita frowned in frustration as she picked through the late Hachimaki's pockets, before standing up with a frustrated sigh. So many pistols used the near-universal 9x19 Parabellum ammunition, even the Taurus Millenium that Hachimaki carried – except that the contrary prat had to use a variant of the weapon with an American .40 cartridge! If there was a God, then He had a sense of humour.

Agapita heard the click of a hammer being pulled back behind her.

Witty, too.

"You're young, little miss." A woman's voice sounded out. "You've made a start here, but you've got a life ahead of you yet. Leave it at this, for now. There's plenty of time to make your score."

Agapita paused for a moment. "Er, are you asking me to surrender?"

"Don't get smart." Agapita heard a click of metal as the woman shifted her pistol's grip in her grasp.

"Could I have your name, at least?"

"You heard it during the MC's introductions already. Carlita Assaye." The voice sounded testy, on edge. Now stop stalling, I know all the tricks."

Carlita hissed angrily as she heard a spattering of gunfire in the distance – and then another separate flurry of shots, closer this time. She couldn't be attacked while she was retrieving the girl's marker, but any bullet could range in and spoil that prospect at any moment. Carlita cursed herself for her sentimentality – she should have just killed Columbina straight away, the girl had volunteered for this match and shouldn't have expected indulgences. The patrons would probably tut at her for bad form if she did it now, though – infuriating thing.

Carlita glanced back to Agapita to see her slowly shifting her position. "Turn around and I'll put a bullet in your head." Carlita snapped.

"What do you want me to do, then?" Agapita replied.

"Drop that toy of yours, now."

Agapita began to squat down towards the floor.

"No! Stop! Stand up!" Maria barked. "Take it by the barrel, between your thumb and middle finger. Hold your arm out, then let it fall."

Agapita paused for a moment. Carlita scowled harshly, shifted her stance, and jabbed her pistol forward in an angry gesture. "I'm losing patience, missy! Do as I say before I decide against letting you off easy!"

Agapita's shoulders rippled in a sigh. She thrust her arm out and released her hold on the Tanfoglio. It dropped—

-and she dropped with it, her legs relaxing and folding beneath her as she collapsed to the floor.

Carlita's eyes were on the pistol and by the time they darted back to the movement in her peripheral vision Agapita was already falling. Carlita fired instinctively, but the shot sailed well over the cyborg to hit the wall uselessly. Agapita tipped onto her back with her head towards the other gladiator, and snatched up the Tanfoglio again, holding it over her head and blasting eight shots at Carlita. The woman screamed and was thrown backwards by the wave of lead, falling to the ground and spurting arcs of blood as her body twisted with the bullets slashing through her.

Once Carlita was laid out on her own back, Agapita rolled herself onto her front. She kept her Tanfoglio trained on Carlita's body and the staircase that she had travelled up, in case anyone else thought that they could capitalise on another's distraction and destruction. Satisfied that she would not be strung into another fight, Agapita got back up to her feet, quietly pleased with herself that the manoeuvre had worked well.

* * *

There was a spontaneous outbreak of applause in the Executive Lounge as the camera showed Agapita's trick, but as Giorgio announced that "Carlita Assaye" was out of the fight Avise fixed on the name rather than the manoeuvre. Assaye… he knew that name. She used to be an officer – he'd met her a couple of times on training courses; and she'd also been one of a list of officers cashiered for "an attitude not conducive to good service" – politics, essentially. Small world after all…

* * *

Agapita was making her way through a block of houses whose bare concrete walls had been abandoned at the first storey, giving the area a character queerly reminiscent of the open ceilings of the FIBUA village back in the Agency's training area. Despite the dissonance of the situation, Agapita felt an unexpected but not unwelcome sense of reassurance as she slipped in textbook routines relentlessly practised during the intensive days of training before she was dispatched here – even to the extent where on a couple of occasions she had menaced the walls and fired at empty air because her muscles remembered her making those exact same movements when turning into a room full of plywood targets. She was brought back to mind the particular reason she was here when her earpiece informed her that Fabio Caprise had surrendered and quit the match—

-and when a shot flashed past her eyes to smack a chunk out of the wall beside her.

A woman had rounded the corner while Agapita had been distracted with the status update, and it had only been the woman's instinctual snap-fire on sighting an enemy which had spared Agapita from getting her skullcase cracked. Agapita's brain knew that her new enemy would correct for a second shot and that there was no time to aim a response, so she fled back into the room she was leaving, bullets skipping and nipping at her heels and shoulders as she ran – the gladiator that she was facing now evidently preferred weight of fire to time-consuming accuracy, and indeed was using a VP70M (the same sort of pistol that Claes had employed back when she was on active service) which could fire semi-automatic bursts. As the gladiator pursued her into the room Agapita dove through an empty window-frame and rolled into cover on the far side of the wall, even as the edges of the gap in the wall were widened by relentless harrying fire chewing away at them.

The gladiator spat a curse at an opportunity lost as her quarry scurried away, like a squeaking little mouse darting for the hole in the sideboard. After using the last of the rounds in her magazine to see if she could harass the girl further by shooting through the walls (with no luck, as the shots only chiselled away at the concrete), the gladiator loaded and used the momentary lull to keep an ear out for her target's movement – she couldn't detect the crunch of gravel that would indicate she was moving away, so was she planning to pop up or blindfire over the window again? The gladiator began slowly creeping towards the corner of the room to put herself at an oblique angle to whatever would appear in the window.

A thin hair of a detail tickled in the gladiator's peripheral vision. She looked up – for her face to meet two bullets as Agapita had sprung up to the top of the wall above her.

* * *

It seemed that Agapita was becoming the star of the show back in the Executive Lounge. If her last exploit in killing Carlita Assaye had provoked applause, this encounter provoked a shiver of gasps. While a nine-foot wall wasn't an insurmountable obstacle to any trained soldier (Avise had done plenty of obstacle courses in his own time), to the patrons' eyes Agapita was a small girl – and she had not only scaled the wall but _bound_ up it, hopping straight to the top in a single jump rather than spending time pulling herself up for the gladiator to have noticed and shot Agapita off at her leisure. While most of the gathering seemed to be enjoying the show Avise noticed that Giorgio, and a few of the more farsighted patrons were looking a little perturbed at Agapita's uncommon feat. Giorgio's jaw continued to open wide as he commentated enthusiastically, but in contrast to the lower half his face his brow was furrowed and his eyes were peering at the televisions closely. Avise frowned, and shifted his feet, feeling his chest holster through his shirt as his position changed.

* * *

Agapita had chased the thin fading breath of grunting and gasping heard at the edge of her vision, only to encounter Fabio Caprise clutching his side and limping in the direction of the aid station. His complaining had also attracted further attention – as Agapita reached him, so too did the foreigner Dylan Cromber.

Her handler liked Spaghetti Westerns – the night before they'd left the Agency for the hotel in Ragusa they'd watched Sergio Leone's _Per qualche dollaro in più _together in his room. Whenever there was a standoff, with the grizzled, swarthy, grimy gunslingers fixing each other with gazes alternately impassive, laden, and burning, the extras made themselves scarce. It was not cheapness or desolation to do so – it left the scene to be filled by the stature of the heroes instead, and for their confrontation to enjoy purity and intensity of concentration, without it being defaced or diluted by the gawping of spectators (even the patrons here had the courtesy to stay a step removed through the cameras dotted across the estate). Two upstanding men in a true test of their might and mettle...

...weren't quite as much in evidence when there was an ungainly cripple stumbling and staggering between them.

It was almost comical. Both Dylan and Agapita wanted to do away with each other, but each also knew of the severe punishment that would be meted out for shooting someone who had quit the match. So the two gladiators sidestepped down the street, occasionally nudging or nosing around the mobile cover that was Fabio, the piggy in the middle - the _stuck pig _of some overgrown juvenile game. Fabio himself was quietly terrified, but with the leaking injury in his side all he could do was continue to shuffle forward in his agonisingly slow progress towards the edge of the estate, his fretful nervous energy all expended in sending his frantic eyeballs rolling crazily about his head. And so, they carefully handled their ginger walk with its fragile cargo – stumbling a couple of times as the sound of gunfights elsewhere in the estate intruded in on them, but never letting it drop and shatter.

In the films, eyes also wandered and darted, as the gunmen examined stances, gauged alliances, remembered grudges, anticipated betrayals, considered skills and tested attacks, and sought to guess – and ultimately chance at – just what interpretive machinery was grinding in the head of their opponents. Agapita was no different. She liked orders, their certainity and reassurance solidifying approaches in her head and putting her into the cyborg's necessary state of concentration. The regulations of the match were an order in themselves, and so were bright in Agapita's mind during this scenario which had been concocted entirely by the specific prohibition of the rules...

..._prohibitions._

The Master of Ceremonies had warned them about the dire consequences for "firing on" the surrendered... but he had issued no such ban on _other _types of handling.

With a cyborg's speed Agapita smartly stepped forward into the street and shoved Fabio aside and down to the ground, moving into his position before the wounded man had time to even squawk. Dylan had quick reactions and immediately fired, but as he'd originally been aiming to the side of the obstructing Fabio his shot only tore the denim of Agapita's sleeve and peeled a little flesh from her arm – while Agapita planted four lead kisses into Dylan's chest.

Dylan fell backwards with a muffled gurgle as pink bubbles frothed up out of his punctured lungs and drowned his dying scream in his throat. Fabio was howling more loudly, swearing that something had torn in the fall. Not wanting to be responsible for Fabio bleeding out before he had left the field, Agapita reached down to roughly hauled him back onto his feet with one strong arm to push him on his way – noticing as she did so the wound which her conditioning had completely obscured.

Agapita frowned with genuine sorrow as she examined the injury. It was small – only one step up from a graze. Would it count? Agapita hoped that it wouldn't, or rather knew that it _shouldn't_, but she was sure that the other girls in the dormitory would fixate on it as if it did, precisely to needle her. To have something so... _trivial_ as her first field injury! It was embarrassing – something so mundane and superificial would make her the laughing stock of the second generation, giving the impression that she feared getting stuck in and was trying to clumsily make do with something lesser to avoid the greater and more noble scars that she lacked the courage to receive. Her cheeks were stinging with the scorn of the cool clique, and Agapita tried to soothe the seat-squirming embarrassment churning within her by saying that while everyone else was using boring old automatics, she had just been shot – well, glanced – by a Colt Anaconda, an extravagant oversized revolver. Didn't that detail make it unique?

Agapita scowled to the air and kicked the dirt of the unfinished road petulantly. She knew that trying to say that would be shot down as reaching before it even taxied onto the runway. Throwing the distressed and still-struggling Fabio an angry glower, she stalked over to the next building.

* * *

It was laughter this time around, as Dylan and Agapita conducted their invisible tennis rally over the net of the hapless Fabio. Everyone was absorbed by the sight, such that the announcement that Enzo Jannis had been wounded and surrendered elsewhere in the match was even delayed by a minute as everyone demanded that the cameras stay with the strange trio. Agapita was rapidly becoming the star attraction and even when her unexpected prowess had upset other patrons' bets they could shrug their loss off and enjoin in the spirit of sportsmanship. Altogether, Giorgio's casting decision was proving to be a huge success – but he didn't look too pleased by it. Avise watched him as he held a quiet and subdued conversation with a small group of a few more of the more venerable patrons – they were conscious of Avise's scrutiny and glanced over to him on a few occasions. Eventually the group parted and Giorgio made his way across the room to Avise.

"Is she on drugs?" He asked tersely.

"What makes you say that?" Avise replied, a little too loudly so that other patrons might notice the Master of Ceremonies' discomposure.

Giorgio scowled openly. "She was hit and she didn't even flinch – and then lifted up Caprise with that injured arm, too. Is she tripping?"

"Did she look like she was spaced out on crack?" Avise growled. "Besides, do you really think I'd demand something like that of my daughter?"

"You're already having people shoot at her to settle your debts, Mister De Marchese." Giorgio grated, his eyes flicking from side to side as he saw other patrons turning from the screens to the sideshow developing right there in the lounge. What a splendid Master of Ceremonies Giorgio was, he provided all kinds of entertainment!

"Columbina just has great... _self-possession_, that's all," Avise explained her resistance to pain, and then continued, again unnecessarily loudly, "and besides, what would it matter if she did have a bit of 'performance enhancement'? It's not as if any money is changing hands here."

Giorgio leaned in close to Avise. "I'm the games master here. I don't like being played."

The Master of Ceremonies swept around extravagantly and expansively to launch straight back into his match commentary and mask the troublesome exchange. Avise was distracted by a few prods and pokes from other patrons – some wanted to congratulate him for holding his own against Giorgio, whereas others were made suspicious by Giorgio's accusations and warned Avise that it was bad form to impose on the gathering when he had appeared only at their invitation and indulgence. Avise nodded in understanding and made polite small-talk with the other patrons – and he also noticed a guard entering the room, with an armoured vest on over his suit.

* * *

Agapita hissed as a shot snatched past and knocked her beret off her head. She dropped back down behind the wall and clamped it back on her head again before quickly reloading and bouncing up to pop off another few shots, ducking again as another near-miss plucked at the seam of her shoulder. She had encountered Jonas Quinn in another rank of unfinished buildings – Jonas had some agility and proficiency, and this was proving to be a much more even and intensive fight as they squatted down, darting from side-to-side underneath chest-high walls before popping up to loose quick flurries of rounds at the other.

It was fast and frantic, hasty and hurried, immediate and intense, with both cyborg and gladiator sparking along as they rose and fell and fired. Power seemed to be conducted between them – they jumped up from cover at the same time, aimed at each other in perfect alignment—

-and dropped back down again as their earpieces both blared simultaenoeusly, "All gladiators, _freeze!"_

Agapita pressed her back against the wall – she realised that she was panting, and sweating.

"Good going, Marchese!" Jonas's voice carried over to her from his own cover, and she could tell that he was breathless as well. "But it's not over yet!"

Agapita was about to respond with some trashtalk of her own – it could be a useful tactic, sometimes disrupting the enemy's concentration – when she was interrupted by the radio coming to life again.

"Attention all gladiators. There is a change to the rules of engagement. We are introducing a lightning round!"

"Oh boy! _Lightning round_!" Jonas laughed manically, relief surging through him. His cackle was so loud and his feeling so honest that it carried past his cover and to Agapita.

"What's a 'lightning round'? Agapita called out over her own wall, eyeing a nearby camera warily.

"It's, ha, it's, hahaha – you know how lightning earths itself along the easiest route, right?"

Agapita shifted her grip on the pistol in readiness to fire again as soon as Giorgio saw fit to finish off his speech and end the time-out. "...Yes." she said eventually. By some happy help from blessed Providence, her handler had done clouds in class literally the day before the fratello had set out on this mission.

"It's like how they put lightning rods at the top of tall buildings," the words tumbled out of the gladiator's mouth, relating the concept solidifying his relief and magnifying his joy, "the shock goes to the most exalted position. If one gladiator is doing exceptionally well, they'll occasionally throw this in to spice it up, level it out for us and let him really see if he's got the right stuff. All of the remaining gladiators ally together against the top performer!"

Agapita gritted her teeth. From Jonas's easy manner she could tell that he hadn't been paying much attention to previous match updates, but she knew from the tally in her head of gladiators killed and surrendered that—

"All gladiators!" Giorgio declared, his voice resounding through the PA system. "_Kill Columbina De Marchese!"_

Jonas stopped laughing. His joy died in his throat, clenched shut by a second's seized tension, and then he vaulted over the intervening walls, sprinting towards Agapita.

"_Biiiiiiiitttccchhh!"_

Jonas moved with adrenalin-stoked speed, catching even Agapita off-guard – by the time she'd processed his approach he was already hurling himself over her cover and crashing down on top of her. Jonas's weight pressed Agapita down into the dirt – all that prevented her from getting a bullet in the head or side while she was pinned was her cybernetic strength. With a convulsing thrust of her arms Agapita threw Jonas off her and back over the wall – following the startled Jonas over, she put half-a-dozen bullets into him before the impact could even force the breath from his lungs.

Wasting no time in contemplating the body, Agapita rolled off of Jonas and into and kneeling position. She glanced over the walls surrounding her – no-one else had closed on her position yet, but the reports would attract attention to her even if Giorgio, currently relating her position over the radio, didn't.

* * *

"...all gladiators, your quarry is currently located in grid D4. Happy hunting!" Giorgio smiled as he tapped his earpiece.

"_What the Hell?_" Avise stepped forward in anger. Truthfully, he wasn't particularly worried – he'd been around cyborgs for over half a year now, he knew what they could do – but if he was to keep up the guise of the concerned father then he had to show some outrage. "What the fuck is this shit you're pulling, Giorgio?"

"_Language_, please, Mister De Marchese!" Giorgio chastised the foul-mouthed and impolite guest. "The modern world is already so vulgar - a little decorum is much appreciated!" His eyes sparkled, flashing with sly pleasure of mischief.

"You can't seriously be going along with this?" He threw his arms out in appeal to the entire gathering. "It's... it's _unfair_!" It was a plain word, but he threw all of his emphasis in the final world, as though he could reach out to touch some fundamental base element in their consciences.

The patrons glanced at each other, but no second to Avise's protest was forthcoming. With more than half of the gladiators already dead or withdrawn, most of their bets and selected gladiators had already failed so there was no honour or prestige to be redeemed by joining Avise and giving their fighters an even challenge again; and for the remainder, they were amongst friends – the Games were fun, but if it came to a decision then they valued enjoying a collective spectacle together before point-scoring over each other.

Avise scowled and span round to Giorgio again, but he stumbled to a stop when he found a guard in front of him. Two more guards had come into the room while the argument was being waged, taking up positions on the upper level at the back of the lounge. All three had MP5K submachine-guns hanging down by their sides.

"We'll take that pistol from you now, Mister De Marchese." Giorgio stood to one side with a quiet, gentle smile – nothing so blunt and crude as a smug grin, naturally. Some of the patrons gasped and giggled at the prospect of a bit of drama.

Avise didn't move. Giorgio coughed. "All parents are convinced that their children are _special, _I'm sure. Any father would be delighted at the prospect for their doted darling to show up the neighbours. Now you have an opportunity to see just what a _unique snowflake_ your precious daughter is."

"Oh, you don't know the half of it, _chevalie_." Avise growled. He would have preferred Agapita to have wiped out all of the gladiators and be back at the villa before they revealed themselves, but an officer had to be flexible and responsive.

The guard standing in front of Avise took a step towards him.

* * *

There were thirteen gladiators, including Agapita ("unlucky for some" Giorgio had chuckled at his consciously lame pun). Agapita had killed five, and three others had retired from the match in other incidents – that left four targets to contend with.

Agapita yelped as a bullet bit into her shoulderblade. Five targets, if she included herself.

Roaring, if more in anger than pain, Agapita used the momentum of the impact to help spin her around and retaliate at wretched little rat that had shot her in the back. Her fire was undisciplined and flew well wide of the attacker – who she recognised as Ryba Sedlacek – while Ryba continued to calmly keep up the attack, putting another bullet in Agapita's gut. While Ryba was still some distance away and at long range the round only bruised against her abdominal cushion, she was closing rapidly and Agapita knew that she was at a disadvantage in this exchange. The cyborg turned away to flee towards the nearest building, a small free-standing three-storey apartment block.

She heard the pattering of footfalls behind her, and Ryba's harsh, angry rasp: "Watch yourselves! The cunt's rabid, she's on PCP – I tagged her but she's still moving…!" Agapita left the other woman's gesticulations behind as she dashed into the building and pounded up the stairs towards the top floor without breath or pause.

As soon as she reached the upper landing Agapita dashed through the empty rooms, the soles of her shoes crackling along a bed of plaster chips that had steadily crumbled from the ceilings, and the plastic cladding of wires for unfitted lights batted at her face. Looking out of the windows of the third apartment on the floor found her mark – three of the gladiators had entered the building and were clearing the rooms cautiously (at least she assumed so – she'd been up here for over a minute and no-one had come up behind her), but the fourth was patrolling outside, circling the building to catch Agapita if she tried to make escape through a window. And, to be fair, it was a sound strategy – she was.

Agapita looked out of the window for a second more to fix the ranges in her head – it was quite safe to do so as the gladiator naturally wasn't expecting anyone to escape from three floors up…

_Geronimo._

You could say that the gladiator actually had the better deal of it. Of that band of brothers, those whose vocation carries them on to stir beyond and lift themselves up out of the cold and wet furrow of mere mortal life, those with the pride and dignity to seek death in the conflagration of violence rather than the stuttering dwindle of miserable peace… not many could attest to meeting their end looking up a skirt before their skull, neck and ribcage was smashed to powder.

Agapita rolled off of the cushion, which squelched and popped beneath her. The gladiator had only had time to inhale before the plummeting Agapita had smashed into him, and she hoped that she would be able to use this to re-enter the building stealthily and come up behind the final trio – naturally spoiled when that infernal man creeping on her ear like an insistent fly just had to pipe up and declare "Mamma mia, it's-a Mario!". A great wit.

A confused-looking face appeared at the window near Agapita – she flung some shots out at him but her was already falling back into the room. With a frustrated growl Agapita vaulted through the empty frame back into the building, actively angry that a plan was being undermined. The room was large and empty – presumably originally intended to be some sort of common room – and unhelpfully, had multiple entrances. Agapita couldn't see any of her targets, but with a twitch of her ear she could hear a sound bouncing between the walls…

"…_this bitch is just going to pick us off like some slasher if we split up to encircle her. We're going to have to risk a charge. Three of us at once, and she might not hit anyone. Ready? Three, two, one—"_

Fire bloomed from each entrance. The din of deafening reports rebounded off and intensified in the enclosed space until the sound of firing overrode all other sense, sheer noise blinding the brain.

Ryba's return to awareness was slow, like how you clench your eyes shut after stinging citrus is spurted into them. She was left with her ears ringing and whistling, her nostrils burning from the stench of baccarite, her cheeks hot, sunspots from the muzzle flashes swimming in her retinas –

And beyond them, the sore sight of Columbina De Marchese on her back, with at least eight red stains spreading across her chest.

For the first time in a long time, Ryba laughed. Not the light joy of relief – there was none of that left in her twisted body – but the harsh, leering nasty sneer of condescension. She turned around to her sudden allies. "Good job Envio, Turreil—" Ryba stopped. Turreil's long career had just come to an end face-down on a dusty concrete floor.

Envio himself was leaning against a doorframe to catch a breather, his empty pistol almost falling through his loose, sweat-slick grip. After gulping in some breaths, he followed Ryba's gaze to Turreil's body. The two gladiators looked at each other. With the turn of a card, that could easily have been either of them face-down in the dirt.

"Sucks to be him, eh?" Ryba grinned.

They both laughed.

Envio walked over to the girl's body and gave her a rough kick in the side. "Her, too. Pretty damn good for her age, but if you fly too close to the sun—"

Agapita lifted up her pistol and shot Envio up through his chin.

"What—" Ryba's eyes instinctively turned to Envio's blood spurting over the ceiling, and by the time she looked down to Agapita three more shots had torn across her abdomen. Her face transfixed in pain – she could not scream as the breath seemed to simply drop out of her – her pistol dropped from her hands as she clutched her midriff and she staggered back to slam heavily against the wall and slide back down to the floor.

"_How_?" Ryba seethed through clenched teeth as she clutched he side, feeling the blood throb up between her pressed fingers. The warmth felt oddly viscous, like treacle, as it spread over her hands. Agapita was standing up. "You fucking bitch, I saw you die! You weren't wearing armour! You were shot, you bled, and you fell!" She had _beaten_ this girl, but as she advanced on Ryba anyway – her shirt ragged and blotchy with red stains – the older woman saw her victory being snatched away by some smarmy, impudent _cheat_. Tears of indignation beaded at the corner of red, stinging eyes, raging at the injustice of her struggle and effort – her _life_ – battering against a solid wall of futility – that wall that had not cracked or crumbled for all the years she had hammered at it. "_Spadas! Uhynes!_" She shrieked hoarsely.

Agapita came to a stop before Ryba. For a second, she looked down on the 'gladiator' with a neutral expression, and then it deepened into an angry frown.

"Of course I fell!" Agapita snapped harshly. She took a hand away from her pistol grip – still keeping it trained on Ryba with her other – and tugged at her shirt. The fabric near one of the bullet holes tore a little. "I was shocked! I was _hoping _that I'd be able to last longer before taking my first real injury, until you and your cronies over there spoiled it. Do you know how much stick I'm going to get from my friends for being penetrated on my very first job?" Agapita ended on a tremulous, quavering note, as though she was on the verge of tears herself – she was hurt, but not from the wounds.

Ryba stared, baffled. She would have laughed, if her torn diaphragm would have actually let her. Was this how it ended, with some obnoxious cunt mocking her with some sarcastic girly trash?

"Fuck you! Fuck you with a fucking _lead pipe_!" Ryba snarled, in Italian so she could make damn well sure that the vile creature could hear her. "See you in Hell!"

"Hell…?" Agapita froze. She stared at Ryba for a long, laden moment – the colour drained out of her face and her expression hollow, as if Ryba's last snapping bite had actually sunk into her. Agapita trembled, and Ryba, seeing her enemy falter, dared to twitch a movement of her own, making to squirm along the wall outside the line of the shivering gun barrel pointed at her.

She had longer to travel to make herself safe, though, as the quaking aim would no longer fly straight towards her but could travel in any direction – but her meagre attempt to escape brought Agapita's attention back down to the world around her again. She narrowed her eyes at Ryba.

"_Not likely._ _Not before. Not now. Not after. Not ever."_Agapita spat in a savage whisper, and then shot Ryba in the heart. Ryba seized, gagged for a few seconds, then fell slack, and died.

* * *

For the first time, Giorgio's confident smile faded. "What?"

"I said, I'm from the Social Welfare Agency," Avise hocked a thumb at the scene played out over the television screens, "and that should be your proof. Do you _really_ want to take this any further, _chevalie_?"

Giorgio flicked his gaze from side to side. Disquiet had settled over the patrons – not only from the sight of seeing a girl get back up after being riddled with bullets, but the fact that even if none of them had heard the term "Social Welfare Agency" before, they could tell that it sounded something alarmingly like _government._ "I don't know what you're talking about." Giorgio grumbled.

"Please, _chevalie_, and I'm the Emperor of China." Avise laughed, remembering a neat line that Alessandro Ricci had spun at him once. "An eminent and august Captain of Industry such as yourself, surely your sophisticated circles discuss weighty matters of the state."

"It's a bluff. You're bluffing. You're lying." Giorgio licked his lips. "You're _fucking _lying. The Agency cyborgs are only little kids, everyone knows that. That's the whole fucking _point_ of them. Not grown women! _Not grown women!_"

"Well, I've got the _improved model_." Avise couldn't help but smirk. As unprofessional as it was, he felt like some movie villain revealing the doomsday device, and it thrilled him.

"Giorgio…" Mrs. Ethergill stepped forward, her voice wavering, "what does he mean? What's he talking about…"

"_**SHUT UP!**_" Giorgio, his composure snapping, swung his head around and bawled a spit-flecking bellow at the elderly woman. "_Shut up_ you shrivelled Limey _bint!" _Mrs. Ethergill went white, looking as though she was on the verge of tears.

Some of the more farsighted patrons were already edging towards the door in what they hoped was a surreptitious and unremarkable manner. Giorgio clenched his teeth. Any pretence at a collected and unconcerned manner was not so much discarded as thrown down and crushed underfoot. "Okay, Mister De Marchese, if that's the way you want to play it. I know enough about you _child molestors_ to know that those little fucktoys of yours won't do anything to harm the dicks that rape them. Pretty mystifying 'plan' of yours, that separated you like this."

Avise shrugged, unconcerned. "She needs the exercise."

"If she needs a workout she can bounce all night on top of me, and she will do once you're in our power, idiot." Giorgio spat. You could imagine the acid bubbling through the floor. Despite the crude remarks, Giorgio's eyes weren't open with delight but narrow with rage - the words seemed to Avise to be something more to aggrieve the handler than actual intent. the threat of the guard in front of him was real enough, though. "Now, give Jacen there your pistol and I might just let you watch."

Avise sighed and unbuttoned his jacket. He extracted his Webley, shifting his grip on it so it was being held by the barrel – and a little of the body. He held it out for the guard in front of him to take – and then the handler opened his palm, gravity made it rotate, and he closed it again with his hand around the grip, covering 'Jacen'.

The guard froze. The spectators gasped. Avise grinned. "Finally. It took me _months_ to learn that trick."

The guard's jaw popped open and closed like a goldfish as his eyes trembled in their sockets, staring at the awful black hole in front of him but unwilling to fix on it. It was a scarce moment, a fraction of second, before he rallied and started forward, making to club Avise's hand aside with the butt of his own weapon – but that was all Avise required to pull back the Webley's hammer and fire.

Three shots banged out, lifting up with the revolver's recoil. The first two thudded dully against the guard's chest, only producing puffs of fabric as they were stopped by his armoured vest – but the third punched through his exposed throat with the loud click of deforming cartilage. The gathering spasmed towards the walls as gore burst back from the nape of the guard's neck. At first they only quailed – the sight was shocking, but by that same token impossible and unreal and difficult to comprehend. The spectators did not hold for long, though, as the guard staggered backwards, his weapon falling from his grasp and jerking on its lanyard like a spastic puppet while his fingertips picked and stretched at the edges of the tunnel bored through his neck as though he could somehow sweep breath into himself. He then drunkenly swung around as his balance faltered, confronting everyone with the awful stretching distended rubber of a drained face in which the eyes seemed to get lost and vanish, and a loose gaping maw whose lips slapped and rippled together, drowning on the very air it galloped into him. He emitted a reedy, rough sigh spattered with pink sputum, lurched forward, and sprawled down.

Pandemonium.

Chaos churned in front of Avise as the spectators disintegrated into a flailing mob, fear and flight overcoming all other sense and thought, crashing against each other and crushing through the exit. The pell-mell panic was what saved Avise, as the other two guards responding to the death of their colleague had to aim high, trying to angle their shots above the heads of their employers. Avise threw himself prone, his head unflatteringly landing between the dead man's legs but keeping him alive as a storm of automatic fire blew out the glass plates behind him in a deafening crash that sounded like rain being buffeted and balled into a solid fist by a gale. It was only a second's respite, and Avise hastily fired off the remaining three shots in his Webley at the second guard standing on the upper level. Two were hopelessly wild, only knocking hunks of plaster out of the walls, but the third exploded the glass balustrade that the guard was standing behind and the guard sank down, screaming as shards dug into his thighs and shins. Avise immediately dropped his empty pistol and scrabbled forward over the carpet and the first guard's body to grab his MP5K. Avise couldn't pull the lanyard out from underneath the body, though, and fear that the remaining guard was only an instant away from opening up on him again caused him to come up firing as he yanked as hard as he could to pull the lanyard along the length of the guard's outstretched arm, stitching the entire magazine down the carpet, disintegrating a chair, up the entire length of the final guard's leg and groin, across his chest and through his shoulder, before smacking a final arc towards the ceiling and blowing out a pair of light fittings in a shower of sparks and splinters. The MP5K's lanyard became caught on the first guard's watch, and Avise tripped forward and fell down as it suddenly pulled taut across his legs. Gasping at a second bruising impact with the floor, Avise immediately pulled himself up—

-to meet the gaze of Giorgio staring at him from around the corner of a settee…

…and a Desert Eagle lying on the ground just inches away from the _chevalier's _hand.

* * *

Agapita paused to wheeze for a short while and flood her body with as much oxygen that her laboured lungs could handle. It was necessary to take her along the next few hundred yards up the rough, steep slope of scrub and crumbling dirt from the estate to the villas. Her chest had been burning hotter and fiercer than Avise had ever pushed her on the tracks back at the Agency compound, and while conditioning had rapidly quenched that fire, it couldn't disguise the coppery tang coating her tongue and speckling the back of her hand when she coughed. An internal diagnostic showed up the weaknesses of the second generation, telling her that the barrage of fire that had knocked her down hadn't only ruined the dress that had been bought specially for her but had broken through her intercostal carapace and punctured five lung cells, reducing her breathing capacity by more than half. Her reserve multilung had been activated to compensate, but even so she was heady and breathless, her lung cells working frantically to scrub every last atom of oxygen from every breath. Still, she shouldn't complain – damaged as she was, if it wasn't for the science filling her body then she would already be dead. A lazy smile wandered across Agapita's face as her brain was instructed to release a wave of warmth of appreciation for her friends and keepers at the Social Welfare Agency.

The smile flattened again as Agapita looked up towards the villas above her and the requirements of the mission came forward in her mind once more. The infernal absurdity of the "Lightning Round" had spoiled the plan: they hadn't meant to turn on the patrons until after the battle was over and Agapita had already suitably thinned out the herd of fighters by winning. Agapita had momentarily fretted and paced about the body of Ryba Sedlacek, the lack of clear direction after the failure of the plan leaving her at loss, but when she had heard shots above her the prime directive of any cyborg had offered her the clarity to continue. The exchange of fire coming down from the top of the hill had now faded, indicating to her that her handler had successfully thwarted opposition (the notion that he might have failed never entered her head), but she would need to get up to him to support him against potential retaliation. Sucking in one final breath, Agapita pushed off again and ran through the scrub.

The terrain was difficult and uneven, but that was precisely why Agapita was making her way through it. Not two hundred yards to her left there was a paved path running up from the estate towards the villas, initially quite straight but turning into a zig-zag as it approached the steeper upper reaches of the concave slope; while it would have sped her progress, particularly given her condition, it would also have left her more exposed to fire – which her condition now precisely did not allow her to risk. The wisdom of her strategy was soon made apparent when she hopped over a rock and the first ranging shots began fell down in a semicircle in front of her.

Agapita immediately threw herself down to the ground, and with no needless alacrity either as the fire, having marked her, suddenly intensified into a withering hailstorm. It seemed as though the world was suddenly inverted, that the ground was digging itself up and burying Agapita – her ears were filled not with the reports of distant gunfire but the roaring of earth as her eyesight dissolved into a bitter and bitty yellow fog and pebbles and clods rained down onto her – much like shovelfuls filling a grave. Still the sound drowned out all else, as though an avalanche was fond of its intimidating bellow and ran in circles around its victim to torment him before sweeping him off the mountainside. The pinning barrage could only have lasted at most ten seconds, but with her heightened awareness Agapita traced every dropping, spinning, disintegrating piece of earth as an individual grain in an hourglass. When the firestorm ended, it slackened off as quickly as it had sped up – not stopping completely, but dwindling to an intermittent sputter of incoming rounds that snatched at drifting threads of the settling dust as they zipped overhead, without stirring any more up. The lightening load allowed Agapita to risk stealing a glance upwards to see what she was confronted with.

The source of the threat was over at the very path that she had been avoiding – a pair of guards was chivvying along a group of six to eight patrons down towards the estate, and from there presumably to the boat on the pontoon at its far end. The guards looked faintly ridiculous – with armoured vests over suits, and then high-visibility jackets over them as though they were living signposts for the patrons – but the weapons in their hands were real enough. Both men carried FN FAL assault rifles (_The AK47 of the West_, an anonymous voice in the back of her head said knowledgeably), and could use them to some fair effect, as the dramatically increased local mineral content of the soil could attest. The fire that she was under had decreased because one of the guards had turned away to keep driving the patrons along, making sure that his wards – and his paycheque – didn't succumb to their civilian flightiness and panic and scatter from the proximity of gunfire. In the meantime his partner was firing deliberate semi-automatic bursts to make sure that Agapita couldn't become too relaxed.

Agapita grimaced as she saw the patrons disappear down the slope around the rim of her vision. There were four separate interdiction fratelli on standby to gather up any fishes that slipped through the mesh in her and her handlers' net, but they were supposed to be a reserve, a backup, a failsafe. While she didn't bear the other cyborgs any enmity this was nonetheless her first mission and it was important to show what she could do and establish her worth and potential, so it vexed her that her mission would be _imperfect_. While her conditioning intervened to cut the link that would have led to her leaping up in a foolhardy attempt to drive the patrons back while there were still two assault rifles pointed at her, it could not prevent those feelings' expression.

At that moment Agapita realised that the interval for the bursts of suppressive fire being directed at her was longer than usual – glancing up, she noticed the guard fumbling with a new magazine while his companion still harangued the last straggling patrons in the group that they were shepherding. While it seemed that the priority of the guards was escape, keeping her head down so that they could get away rather than press home the assault, the fact remained that Agapita was under attack and her conditioning told her exactly what she needed to do. Besides, the nice lie-down that she had just enjoyed had granted her a good long rest.

Agapita immediately punched up into a sprint, ignoring the wiry briars scratching at her shins and tearing a gouge along the ground towards the two guards. She was exhausting her limited stamina in one burst, but her legs propelled her across almost the entire ground separating her from her two enemies, provoking audible cries of alarm from them. Retaliatory fire was immediate but hasty, with long bursts streaming widely on either side of her and only crossing together when Agapita had already rolled down into a depression for cover and recovery, her ragged lungs shrieking piteously. For a full half-minute Agapita gasped for air, her chest veritably oscillating at a sprinter's pace itself, while more fire continued to knock clods of dirt out of the lip of the dip above her head. Then it abruptly stopped, cutting out at once. Agapita shifted her head slightly as a rolling piece of gravel pattered down and tickled her nose. She could guess that these guards held self-preservation in high esteem – no use in being paid heaps more than a meagre military salary as a mercenary if you weren't there to collect it at the end of the day – and they were trying to tempt her out rather than advance on her and risk a prepared shot to the face as soon as they headed into view. It suited Agapita's purposes anyway – while she was just inside her Tanfoglio's effective range, she wanted to close the distance a little more to ensure accuracy.

Feeling ready to make another bound, Agapita scrambled out of the dip and tumbled towards the protection of a large rock in a half-run, half-crawl with a posture that was almost bent double, clumsy and ungainly but at least presenting a smaller profile as she was exposed. She threw an arm out as she moved and fired half a dozen shots herself – all unaimed and jerking wildly with her gait but hopefully enough to make the guards keep their heads down. Her enemies were already down, though – they had gone prone on the far side of the path and Agapita's bullets sailed harmlessly over their heads, while she was in full exposed sight to their blazing response to her emergence. A lancing pain driving into her side informed Agapita that a kidney had been destroyed, and as she approached the rock that she had been running towards her left leg simply went numb.

Agapita fell rather than dove behind her new cover, landing with a winding impact that knocked what little threads of breath still remained in her ruined chest – lots of ventilation, but sadly not much circulation. As she began the troublesome process of filling up her depleted stamina again, Agapita inspected her damaged leg, grimacing openly when she saw that there was a visible chunk of muscle missing from her thigh near the ragged hem of her dress, staring at her like an ulcer. Agapita twitched to test her leg's movement and found that while it could work, it felt weighted with inertia, as though she wasn't pulling her leg but rather a cord which then pulled the leg, losing energy and control in the process. As Agapita was surveying this, another part of her head noticed that the fire from the two guards had now stopped completely, with not even the occasional reminding shot chipping away at her rock. Her ears couldn't pick out any crunching earth to indicate that the two guards were making a move, so they were still covering her, but the lack of fire suggested that they were both running low on ammunition after that last fusillade – yet as dearly as she would have liked to, Agapita couldn't put much faith in them running out.

What to do? She could simply lie here and wait until the two guards decided that she had passed out or given up and used it as an opportunity to get away, but the prospect of letting enemies escape, particularly in her first mission where she needed to make a good impression, rankled with her – and in any case it would be a further delay separating her from her handler when he would need her, which was intolerable. Agapita needed to respond in some way, but the analytical part of her brain pulled her down and said quite curtly and sternly that rising up to a position on top of the rock or rolling out beside it would only result in a faceful of lead.

Shirting her body around, Agapita risked a quick flash of a glance around the edge of the rock to check the position of her two adversaries, trusting her eyes to photograph what it would take an ordinary human long seconds of study to discern. Immediately there was the buzzing sting of a bullet past her ear, the whipping crack of a second scarring the rock above her, and then her vision was obscured as a third kicked up a cloud of dirt and ricocheted up to smash her cheekbone. Agapita fell back behind the rock, teeth and eyes clenched and humming with pain as her entire skull seemed to buzz from the impact like a rung bell. But even as her eyes were closed, a scene was etching itself into the back of her eyelids, a fundamental world of distilled elements linked together with a wireframe of distances and angles...

Without looking, Agapita thrust her arm out of cover and fired two shots. She waited a few seconds, and then hauled herself up to look over the rock.

The two guards lay face down in the dirt, limbs in prone position and by all appearances ready to shoot – except that their two round craniums were cracked and leaking like popped pimples.

Agapita afforded herself a smile. It had been very good of them not to shift their positions, really.

Using the rock as a support, Agapita slowly pushed herself back to her feet, testing how much weight she could put on her damaged legs and clicking her jaw with her hand to make sure that the ricochet into her face had done nothing practical. After making the polite gesture of patting herself down, she began limping over to the two dead guards, glancing up the slope as she did so. She hoped that no-one would hold it against her if she took the path from now on.

* * *

For a second Avise was completely bamboozled by the sight of the Desert Eagle. If the sky could rain pistols, why couldn't the rivers flow with milk and honey and queuing at the Post Office not take all morning? He then remembered the patron who had boastfully shown off the pistol earlier – when Avise had kicked everything off the man must have thought that he could be some sort of hero, only for the clumsy amateur to get jostled and drop it in everyone else's scrum to get out. Giorgio seemed as surprised by the pistol's presence as Avise was, only noticing the weapon when his fingers brushed against the butt of its grip.

Despite his lofty rank and station Giorgio wasn't such an urbane sophisticate that he would laughingly dismiss the blessings of God. His eyes rolled down to the Desert Eagle.

His eyes swivelled back up to Avise.

The two men blinked at each other.

Then with the light-fingered flash of a card sharp, Giorgio's hand was suddenly fixed around the Desert Eagle's grip and rising.

It was five strides to the settee – Avise would never make it in time. Yelling a wordless cry of animal effort he flung his empty MP5K at Giorgio with all the force that he could muster, its body clipping the knight in the side of the head and catching him off balance as he made to stand up. With a cry of alarm Giorgio fell back behind the settee and out of sight. The Desert Eagle boomed, a shot cannoning through and exploding another of the upper-level balustrade's glass panels. As the MP5K was thrown forward, Avise fell back, scrambling back over the spread-eagled body of the first guard to snatch up his Webley, break open its cylinder, spring out the spent rounds, and ram home a half-moon clip—

Giorgio clenched the leather upholstery of the settee as if he was grabbing a lunk of hair. He sprang up around the side of the settee, swinging his arm around in a wide arc to bring his weapon to bear... and see that Avise was already pointing his Webley directly at him.

Avise's finger tightened on the trigger – and twitched off. Giorgio wasn't a coward – he had skill, and the spirit to use it – and in witnessing that Avise suddenly felt his earlier pang of admiration for these people, their faculties and stature and achievements, swim up in front of him once more. It was something special, distinct, precious, something which justified the blessings of the human condition and held its image apart from the swarm of the flock or the herd or the mass – Avise realised that he didn't _want _to destroy it.

Rather than shooting Giorgio through the heart Avise aimed down and put a bullet through his thigh instead.

Giorgio howled loudly and collapsed where he stood, the Desert Eagle thudding heavily to the carpet beside him. Avise immediately paced over to him and kicked both the Desert Eagle and the spent MP5K away before squatting down over the lamed Master of Ceremonies. Giorgio was still yowling and his hands batted and pressed at Avise's face weakly, so with an irritated grunt Avise roughly grabbed one of Giorgio's arms, wrenched it down and pinned it under his knee whilst he pulled off Giorgio's belt and tightened it around the man's wounded leg as an improvised tourniquet.

Avise was interrupted from his work by the sound of a groan wheezing out on the far side of the room. The handler flashed his Webley around to confront the second guard – the one whose legs had been glassed – with his hands around the upper-level balustrade and wearily dragging himself into a sitting position.

"Easy, boy..." Avise warned the guard. The guard's head rolled around slowly. Apparently he had been unable to see through the fog of pain and had been unaware of Avise until the handler had voiced his attention – but the sight of the Webley made his eyes snap open. Seeing violence as imminent rather than merely threatened, the guard threw up his own MP5K, a surge of adrenalin damping the pain of his lacerated limbs.

"_Cuntlips!" _Avise swore angrily, shooting all five remaining rounds in his revolver. The one-handed fire was inaccurate and two shots missed completely while a third only hit the guard's vest, but the fourth bit into the meat of his arm while the fifth formed his final sensation, smacking away half of his jaw in a thick messy splurge of bone and gore. The guard fell onto his side, rotating as though his pelvis was a pivot, and didn't move again.

Avise puffed out a sigh through his cheeks and stood up, the pressure on Giorgio's trapped leg making him squeak and whimper. Giorgio had spent his lungs now, but he continued to gasp and hiss and whine, reaching and stretching for his wound – but while his hands could turn a trick and conduct an audience, he couldn't lay them on and heal the sick.

"Oh, stop whining, you big wet nancy," Avise growled, "you've only been shot. Save it for something serious." As he spoke Avise put a hand around the barrel of his Webley and pulled open the top-breaking cylinde to reload it again. As the spent casings sprang up towards his face, Avise paused for a moment as a certain realisation struck him. He'd owned this pistol for close to two decades. After passing out from the officer's college at Modena he had had a week's leave before having to present himself for his first assignment, which he had spent at home with his mother and younger sister (and wasn't that a blast from the past, given the parlous state of his family relations now). He had gone to the cupboard in the corner of the spare bedroom which had held what remained of his late grandfather's possessions: his mother had always wanted to sell off his grandfather's medals to a collector, particularly in the years after his father's death when money was tight, and especially wanted to be rid of his awards from the Fascist _Esercito Nazionale Repubblicano, _the army of the Salo Republic, which she considered to be an embarrassment. Avise had appealed and won to sentimentality, though (apart from the fact that his grandfather didn't have any bravery decorations and his common campaign medals weren't especially valuable), and one more thing fallen in that pool was the Webley, which he had picked out of a small cardboard box, wrapped in a cushion of crinkly papier-mâché and which looked as though it hadn't even seen air or daylight since the war. He'd cleaned it, oiled it, gone to the local gunsmith and asked about getting ammunition for it. His company commander in the regiment had upbraided the young Second Lieutenant Mancini and spent an hour educating the spit of a one-pipper as to the logistical and doctrinal importance on standardisation and uniformity when he had asked about policy on personal firearms. Avise had carried the Webley with him back to its far-distant home in Somalia, and then on to further fields in Cyprus, East Timor, Kosovo and Iraq. In eighteen years – and fifty more before that – the Webley had fired misses, a couple of woundings, and killed those dogs that had chewed up his arm...

...but today was the first day that Avise had ended the lives of human beings with it.

Avise loaded a fresh clip of rounds and snapped the cylinder of the Webley shut. He patted the barrel into his palm a few times in idle thoughtfulness, before closing his fingers about it and rubbing it in his grip. He hoped to communicate to it that it wasn't a waste of metal on the press like the disposable plastic gadgets that they sold in the shops, but had fulfilled its function and proved its purpose.

Avise pushed the Webley back into his chest holster. He stepped over Giorgio to gather up the thrown MP5K, and then retrieved some spare magazines from the bodies of the three dead guards in the room. He broke up the Desert Eagle and the two other MP5Ks and threw their firing blocks through the broken window plates and over the edge of the veranda, just in case Giorgio got the notion in his head that he would muster some defiant crawling courage.

"Unfasten that belt in ten minutes' time." He turned to Giorgio and instructed him levelly whilst he reloaded his acquired submachine gun. "Leave it for half a minute, and then fasten it again, as tight as you can. Unfasten, rest, and refasten at fifteen minutes intervals, otherwise we might end up needing to amputate it."

"_Shhhhrrguuuuurrrl!" _Giorgio emitted something that was equal parts sigh, growl, and drowning bubble. Avise shrugged, and then turned away towards the hall to begin clearing the rest of the villa.

* * *

The black Hum-Vee's engine roared as the hulking vehicle stormed a path on the road back down to Agrigento, its overtaking scarcely more than barging other cars aside and making oncoming vehicles swerve aside onto the verges, their horns wailing terrifiedly.

There had been protests from the patrons at leaving their own cars behind, but if the Gladiator Games were rumbled then the cars were already marked, and a long snaking column of vehicles on a single road would be no less obvious – at least with this heavy vehicle barrelling down the hillside the patrons who had piled into it, with two of their guards in the front, at least had a chance of making themselves scarce once they reached the town. And to be quite honest, even despite the awful and atrocious situation that had developed back at the villa, the giddy, high-pitched, slightly demented laughter that sounded when the Hum-Vee slewed around a corner at speed indicated that it was actually still somewhat thrilling.

The road started to zig-zag across the hillside as it began the descent into Agrigento. At each corner there was a rough gravel lay-by to allow cars whose brakes had failed on a downward run some room to lose speed rather than just catapult themselves off the road. They weren't supposed to be used as rest-stops for precisely that reason, as it invited collisions, but in the lay-by at the end of the the Hum-Vee's current straight the contrastingly curvaceous shape of a Ferrari F430 was parked. Naturally such a remarkable vehicle in such an irregular situation attracted attention, and as the eyes of the Hum-Vee's driver focused in on the Ferrari, they also noticed that a long-haired girl was leaning out of its window ...

..._and that she was firing a rifle!_

The driver instinctively braked as the first shots sparked and spanged off of the Hum-Vee's toughened front, and then jerked aside as one shot ricocheted off of the bonnet and starred his windscreen, but the loss of speed only gave the Ferrari's gunner more time to press her attack, and shots continued to pummel the Hum-Vee's engine compartment. Realising what was happening, the driver regained his composure, opened the throttle and sped down towards the corner, aiming to sweep past the Ferrari and leave it behind – but as they approached, the Ferrari smoothly began to move, rolling and then accelerating forward with nary a decibel of over-revving or the slightest twitch of a misapplied clutch, and neatly slotted itself in ahead of the Hum-Vee on the next long straight of the zig-zag.

The Hum-Vee sought to push ahead of the F430, or shove it aside, but with its tighter handling and efficient engine the Ferrari easily – almost nonchalanatly – coasted outside of the truck's reach. The Ferrari had complete control of the road, and with it being too narrow to turn around without stopping, the Hum-Vee was entrapped, having no choice but to keep barrelling down in the hope that the F430 driver's concentration would break before the armour on their own vehicle did, and he made a mistake that they could exploit – but all the while, the girl was there, her black hair flailing in the rushing wind but quite dauntlessly (especially seeing as any incoming traffic could have swiped her head off) continuing to direct disciplined, regular, rapid bursts of fire into the front of the Hum-Vee. The Hum-Vee's front passenger tried to respond by blazing away with a pistol around the window, but all the girl did was adjust her next burst to the left slightly and swat away the offending weapon with a bullet through the perpetrator's arm. Even though it was careering along at fifty miles an hour on a narrow mountain road, the Hum-Vee was impotent – pinned like a wrestler as the numbers counted up to defeat, and flailing uselessly to try and squirm out from an iron hold that had veritably transfixed it.

As the two vehicles reached the end of the third straight, the Ferrari put on an additional burst of speed, conjuring up power seemingly from sorcery with the maddening way that its driver just always applied that little bit more effort than the Hum-Vee, and jumped forward to take the corner with a lead. As it drifted around the bend, the gunner fired one final, lengthier sustained burst from her rifle. Even with an armoured body the Hum-Vee could only sustain so much much damage, and it seemed that being pummelled by three magazines' worth of ammunition from an XM8 rifle, directed carefully and unfalteringly, had overwhelmed it. Its engine noise died away in a choking grip; the steering suddenly became leaden and unresponsive; black smoke began gouting billowing ashen streams thought the ruptured radiator and bonnet and having its fumes seep into the cabin, reducing everyone present to hacking fits. Spent and confounded, the Hum-Vee wearily trundled into the lay-by and slumped into a stop.

The Ferrari drew up on the side of the road itself a couple of hundred yards further down the next straight, and Kara immediately disembarked, sprinting back up to the Hum-Vee to arrest its occupants. Michele, the driver who had so smoothly negotiated the brief confrontation with a suave minimum of fuss, was about to follow her at a more leisurely pace but turned instead to the blare of a siren – a Carabinieri Land Rover was coming up the slope towards them. Two policemen disembarked – the fact that they weren't fleeing or calling for backup suggested that they hadn't seen the chase and were thinking that this was a case of a breakdown – by the time their eyes processed the unusual situation Michele was already in their faces, smiling genially and holding up his government credentials.

"No need to concern yourself with this, friends." Michele reassured the two Carabinieri. "Breakdown repair, that's all. Ordinary business – you can move on."

"_Breakdown repair? _In a _Ferrari?" _One of the Carabinieri spluttered incredulously, even though Michele was shaking his government badge in a meaningful way.

"Oh yes." Michele nodded. "The Sicily Auto Agency _does _guarantee that mechanics will respond to any call from its members within half an hour, after all." He glanced back to the F430 and the wrecked Hum-Vee. Kara was covering the shaken-looking people slowly and tremblingly emerging from the passenger compartment of the black carriage. The two guards delayed for a moment, weighing their chances to run or fight – but not to mention the fact that one of them had a wounded arm, when there were cliffs both high and low all around and a readied enemy wielding an assault rifle, an _accurate_ assault rifle, the prospects weren't promising. They threw their remaining weapons out of the windows and got out to join the patrons kneeling down around the back of the Hum-Vee.

"And what insight into engineering can be contributed by a gun?" the second Carabiniere asked with what he must have thought was sly conspiratorial coolness rather than a myopic and imbecilic inability to understand an implication.

"An essential component in any mechanic's toolbox." Michele explained. "In case the fan belt has broken and no lady may spare a stocking – as comely as her bare legs might be – we use it to make air-holes in the bonnet." He was still holding up his government badge.

Still prodding forward with curiosity, the senior of the two Carabinieri looked past the badge and over Michele's shoulder – and then he blanched and stumbled back in an open, horrified take as he began to see just who were being offered the opportunity to patronise roadside services.

You didn't need to be a spy to pick up on such a complete failure of composure. Michele raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Sir, would you happen to know these people by any chance?"

"Er, no, n-n-not at all." The Carabiniere stammered like a first-year schoolboy in front of the headmaster.

"That's a great pity. Are you sure? It would be helpful to us to know their driving history; we can improve our service with tailor-made advice, then." Michele shook his head sadly at an opportunity for good business being lost.

"I-I'm afraid not, terribly sorry." The Carabiniere turned around to head back to his Land Rover, grabbing his partner by the arm and almost dragging him along as he did so. "Come _on_ Pieri, we have a lot of _paperwork_ to do at the _station_." The second Carabiniere was momentarily baffled and looked as though he was about to protest, but seeing his partner so obviously spooked clammed him up. He hurried along behind the senior Carabiniere, who was walking with a stiff, inflexible stride that indicated that his brain was pleading with his legs not to break into a run. They got back into their Land Rover, which took off past Michele and down the hill as if it was in a chase of its own.

Michele smiled as they went. He genuinely wished the two policemen every success – if nothing else the tale of the day when they, mere humble coppers, had one fated brush with the stuff of thrillers would keep them in beer in the _tavernas_ for some time to come. And if there was genuinely something amiss with that Carabiniere, well, it'd come out in interviews with their new guests – let the bent badge stew in panic for a few days, he'd taste all the sweeter.

As he walked the short distance to Kara, Michele's mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked a text message as he moved. "The Section One catch-wagons are on their way up from Agrigento, Kara," he informed her, "and should be here in fifteen minutes or so. Just keep covering him until then."

Kara nodded in reply. Michele noticed that a number of their prisoners were openly gawping at his cyborg, and while the sight of an Asian teenage girl in a skirt (and Gucci boots) covering them with a prototype rifle whose curves made it into some sort of sci-fi laser-blaster was certainly distinct, the close interest was indecent. Michele followed their eyes and started himself when he saw that his cyborg's cheek has been torn and a flap of flesh was hanging loosely from the side of her face, exposing her teeth.

Michele winced. "Are you alright there, Kara?"

"It's just cosmetic, no big deal." Kara reassured her handler, not taking her eyes or her aim off from their prisoners as she did so. "They could have ripped up my jacket instead!"

"Thank Heaven for small mercies." Michele murmured. "And on that topic, if they were aiming at you at least they were directing their shots away from the pristine body of my precious Ferrari."

"Jerk!" Kara cried, although half of her face twitched in a smile to indicate that she understood it was only a bit of gentle teasing.

There was a gust of wind as a civilian car approached the corner. As it swung around, adults and children stared at the scene with saucer-eyes through their windows, before shooting off down the next straight with indecent haste.

Kara tossed her head and her long dark hair haughtily. "Rubberneckers!"

* * *

Where one of the Hum-Vees had swung round down to Agrigento, the second had turned the other way up towards Selinunte. It had pounded the asphalt no further than a mile when a silver Toyota Corolla suddenly burst out of the recessed concealed entrance of a farmhouse's driveway, darting out into the middle of the road with a forte crescendo of engine power. The Hum-Vee screeched a tyre-flaying brake to avoid a collision, but the driver was skilled and dropped gears down to smoothly accelerate back up to speed rather than pitch into a stall. The Hum-Vee then gunned a burst of power and sprang forward in an attempt to shunt the Corolla and use the Hum-Vee's weight and girth to barge the lighter street car off the road. However, the Corolla had been enhanced with a custom twincharged engine, and neatly hopped forward to avoid being caught on the Hum-Vee's horns.

For a few seconds the vehicles kept their relative positions on the road as they contemplated their next moves – even though the surrounding countryside had streaked into a blur, the cars were still, drifting lightly and slowly across the width of the road like two martial artists slowly circling each other and trying to read their stance and anticipate an attack.

The Corolla made the first move, jinking to the side, while an orange flash from a rear passenger window indicated that this was a _freestyle _match. The Hum-Vee was alert and responsive though, and moved with the Corolla so that the gunshot that had been directed to tearing open its wheel did no more than chip an insignificant sliver from its front. The Corolla attempted the manoeuvre twice more, but each time the Hum-Vee matched its move and caused the shots to glance ineffectually off its armoured shell. Evidently deciding that its opponent had had a fair throw of the dice, the Hum-Vee took the opportunity to retaliate, as its front passenger thrust an MP5K out of the window and plastered the rear of the Corolla with a sustained burst of fire, pummelled and puncturing the boot with dents and dimples, shattered lamps and etched frost into its rear window.

Inside the cabin of the Corolla, Brian clutched himself around the length of his HK416 assault rifle (wincing a little as he burnt his chin on the hot muzzle) and rolled into the rear footwells, thankful for the armoured plate that had been installed in the back of the car's boot but not trusting it to hold.

"_Allison!_" He yelled to the ceiling. "Why the Hell did you move early? We should be _pursuing _them! They could move down a junction and we couldn't respond to it!" Not to mention that the Hum-Vee would be shooting through the front of the vehicle and Allison was a lot more durable than he was.

"Simple!" Allison yelled back from the driver's seat, glancing in the rear view mirror to check that the Hum-Vee was directly behind her. "It's so I can do _this_!"

The Corolla had lost one brake light but the remaining one blazed an angry crimson of narrow squinting fury, and smoke screeched from its tyres, flaring out from each side like the acrid, sulphurous and laden breath of a dragon's nostrils. The Hum-Vee was alarmed at seeing the other vehicle try to brake back into it and wreck both vehicles into a tangled mangle as each tried to roll over the other - the light truck might have been heavier and capable of easily surviving a shove or swipe or knock, but a direct impact and lasting collision was a different matter and would rip the chassis apart. The Hum-Vee immediately swerved to one side – but the Corolla did not slide back into the position that it had just vacated. The car hadn't braked at all – it had just deployed smoke from canisters as a ruse. Now, the Hum-Vee's side was clearly presented, and the angle of attack was perfect.

Fire hammered back from the Corolla, with three heavy bursts blasting through the Hum-Vee's front passenger window and shredding its gunner in a whickering whirl of lead and glass, before switching down to rend through its front and rear wheels, shattering hubcaps like plates and stripping off rubber like ragged orange peel. Hum-Vees were equipped with air pumps that could reinflate tyres and keep them running even when punctured – but they were of little use when there were no tyres left to pump to.

With two wheels literally smashed from their axles it was like sweeping out and knocking a leg out from underneath the Hum-Vee. The truck collapsed onto the edge of its chassis, and grinding up a distended wail of scraping sparks and tortured metal it span around twice, literally tearing a ragged furrow through the tarmac of the road before pitching off the side and bashing through a dry-stone wall, finally shuddering to a steaming, creaking halt.

The Corolla now sprayed some genuine smoke and neatly flipped around in a tight half-doughnut, its engine braying boastfully, before slowing down to a casual saunter that drew to a stop on the opposite side of the road to the wrecked Hum-Vee.

As she picked up her Kimber Custom pistol from where she'd kept it in the driver's door's side-pocket, Allison glanced at the two looping circles that the Hum-Vee had ploughed through the surface of the road, cutting through the skin of asphalt and bleeding out churned-up stone onto either side of the wound. "Just like figure-skating." She sighed happily, her eyes rolling with the trail.

Both cyborg and handler got out of the Corolla. Brian went over the boot to don a high-visibility jacket and pull out some road signs (hoping that the earlier gunfire had not torn them up too badly) to position further down the road to reassure any incoming motorists that the accident was being dealt with and to dissuade good Samaritans from stopping to help the sick man on the side of the road; Allison made to cross the road and cover the dazed occupants of the Hum-Vee (and survivors, this time, with the shattered edges of the front passenger window highlighted in red) who were stumbling out and collapsing down around it.

"Hey, wait, Allison!" Brian called out.

"What is it, sir?" Allison turned back to her handler, a little perplexed.

Brian tapped a finger towards the rear edge of their Corolla. "Highway Code. You're stopping on a thoroughfare – don't forget to put on your hazard blinkers!"

* * *

The path leading down from the villas followed the edge of the estate around until it reached the shore. The patrons, running or jogging as their age or composure allowed them to, glanced fearfully over the low, half-finished walls which until recently had been a den of entertainment, yet now dragged at them like the sucking edges of a pit of foreboding. A good view did not necessarily mean a front-row seat.

By some mercy the motor-cruiser was still moored to the pontoon – while a pair of guards were hopping anxiously on the cockpit and looking towards the villa with fretful expressions, evidently fear of losing their pay had prevented them from casting off and getting out themselves. The patrons all sighed in relief and thankfulness, although whether their exhalations of gratitude were offered up to the Lord or to Mammon, who could say?

By the shore was a long, low hut, presumably originally intended to be a chandlery and canoe store for the marina that was never made, that served as the aid station for wounded Gladiators that had retired from the fight. A doctor in a bloody smock was emerging from the hut, followed by a line of the three walking wounded who had survived the match, supporting themselves on crutches.

"What's going on?" The doctor demanded.

"It's the cops!" The lead patron gasped. He wasn't going to make an issue of the doctor's lack of proper polite form in this situation. "We need to get out, now!"

"I thought that they'd all been paid off!" The doctor shouted, although he seemed more angry than fearful – something about his clinical character must have taken exception to the notion that a procedure was not being followed exactly.

"Evidently not enough!" The patron scowled. "Greedy little graspers—"

The patron was interrupted by a loud sound, like the anbaric arcing _crash _of powerful floodlights switching on. He looked past the baffled-looking doctor, and his own eyes widened in awful, uncomprehending horror as the cruiser... _dropped_. Literally dropped. The boat did not so much sink as fall, as if it had been suspended in air rather than water, and dropped until it struck the bed and only the cockpit was visible above a surface that had swallowed the cruiser with the efficiency of variably-dense fluids settling into their levels, with scarcely a ripple – except for a pair of very confused guards floundering in the water where the sudden loss of footing had pitched them. It was almost darkly comical, but—

"That'll be enough, ladies and gentlemen." A gruff voice called out. "Get down on the ground, if you would."

Everyone spun round to the source of the sound. Standing atop a mound and looking over the scene were two people – a middle-aged man and, bizarrely, a young girl, one with a grizzled greying beard while the other had a lank mess of red hair tumbling down her back. Both were dressed in wetsuits and were still dripping – but the rifles in their hands were dry, and hot.

The two guards in the water kicked up some white foam, seeing distance and intervening targets as an opportunity to swim off around the nearby headland and get away – but they were driven back to the shore when the older man twitched his arm up and barked a terse burst of bullets to spash into the water around them ("I'd have just shot 'em. Sunken bodies blow up hilariously." the girl murmured out of the side of her mouth). The harsh, curt commanding reports overwhelmed the civilians and they immediately pressed themselves into the ground. The gladiators paused, and then followed, albeit creaking down more slowly and gingerly to relieve the pressure their wounded bodies – they had got involved in this game for practicality's sake, and there was no utility in trying to go against a pair of fit opponents who already had them cold.

But some gladiators approached their agents because they were chancers risking all on a last desperate, dramatic and determined throw of the dice. One didn't see two special forces operatives, but an old duffer well past it, and some weird deformed midget – both of whom were relaxing, thinking that their enemies were cowed. True, the gladiator's left arm was useless, a clutch of shots stripping the flesh down to the bone... but then, he was right-handed.

Launching up from a kneeling position, the gladiator reached under the doctor's jacket, yanked a handgun out from his back, threw it up, and fell back down. He convulsed, jerked, juddered, trembled, and finally twitched until the hard _chak_ of the empty bolt of the small girl's Kel-Tec sounded out. When his body was more soup than solid it was difficult for him to do anything else.

"Elio said, _stay down._" The girl said stroppily.

The older man, the one called Elio, winced. "Marisa, that was a little bit excessive."

The young girl, Marisa, smiled broadly despite the admonishment. "But sir, there's 'no kill like overkill'!"

* * *

Danio's co-pilot leaned over to tap him on the shoulder, and then hocked a thumb back into the passenger compartment of the Super Puma. "Some of our guests are feeling a bit queasy."

Danio pulled on the joystick and felt his stomach roll as he brought the helicopter skidding up another slope – but to him it was a pleasant sensation, a core of weight and worth in his chest, the bubble of a spirit level. He grinned back at his co-pilot. "Unique experience that cannot be found anywhere else – it's what they paid for!"

They both laughed. Truth be told, Danio was actively enjoying himself – flying low to follow the contours of the ground was demanding and exhilarating, and he hadn't had a chance to do it since testing for his license. He wasn't particularly worried about the explosion at the villas. He had got himself, his vehicle and his cargo away, and he had already scheduled an arrival at the Palermo heliport in advance. There were lots of empty fields gone to seed in Sicily's interior as increasingly numbers of farmers gave up on agriculture and moved on – it would be simplicity itself to put down in one of them, pause for a few minutes to strip off the fake registration number currently painted on the side of the Super Puma. After that, callsign Dela-Hotel-Zero-Fower - _not _Sierra-Oscar-Too-Hait – could ascend back to standard cruising height and make its way over to Palermo at its leisure, allowing both his passengers and himself to remove themselves as casually as they pleased as though nothing was amiss – the perfect service: the presence of danger was no need to lose your relaxation. Danio banked the helicopter in long, lazy rolls up the curves of a V-shaped valley cutting through the hillside, held poised on the crest of an arc over the hilltop, and then almost cheered as he blew down the far side in a bluster of dust and rotors—

_BANG! _The whole helicopter quivered.

"_SHIT!" _Danio yelled aloud, jerking back on the joystick and lurching the Super Puma to a queasy halt and a bleary lurk of a lever hovel. There were no warning lights on his control panel - had they collided with something? "Did we scrape a tree? You're supposed to be _watching out_ for that stuff, you _stupid fuck_!" He bawled openly at his co-pilot.

The co-pilot looked panicked. "But the field's clear! You can see it yourself! I don't—

"Callsign Delta-Hotel-Zero-Fower, calling Callsign Delta-Hotel-Zero-Fower," the radio bleeped, and _not _with a call to 'Sierra-Oscar-Too-Hait', "this is Ground Station... _Pasta_. Are you receiving me?"

Danio and his co-pilot looked at each other. "Keep our patrons calm." He growled under his breath. The co-pilot nodded, slipped off his headset and made his way back into the passenger compartment while Danio switched his radio to 'transmit'. "Ground Station, uh, Pasta, this is Callsign Sierra-Oscar-Too-Hait. Pardon me for interrupting, but I've been running shuttles all morning and I can tell you that there's no aircraft of Callsign Delta-Hotel-Zero-Fower currently aloft. Are you certain that you have the right reference?"

The response was immediate "Oh, I'm fairly certain that we do, Mister _Danio Enris_. Now, you might be wondering what that noise you heard earlier was. There is an adhesive mine currently attached to your hull. Any attempt to deviate from the instructions that I am about to give you will result in its immediate detonation without warning. Thanks a lot for flying so low, incidentally – it made aiming a lot easier for my girl."

"Danio, what's going on—" the co-pilot bent back into the pilot's compartment, and his words died in his throat when he saw Danio's expression. The co-pilot quietly slipped into his seat and restored his headset.

"There is a field a quarter of a mile ahead of you at bearing zero-fower-sex degrees magnetic," the voice that was 'Ground Station Pasta' explained, "marked by orange smoke. You are to make your way to that location, put down there and turn off all engines and instrumentation. Any attempt to deviate from this course will result in your helicopter's destruction – and it's such a _nice _luxury VIP model too, it'd be such a shame."

With his earlier ebullient confidence comprehensively swept away, like straw in a helicopter's fierce downdraft, Danio seemed to work entirely by automatic – he was, after all, one of the Help. The Super Puma slowly thopped over to the designated landing zone, thick coloured smoke pouring from a clutch of thrown grenades like the feather on the quarrel that had marked him. As Danio lowered the helicopter down to the ground, Section Two support staff dressed in combat fatigues and bushed up with vegetation began to rise up from a circle of undergrowth surrounding the landing zone and make their way towards it, pulling the noose tight.

The co-pilot watched someone pull off a helmet to reveal a woman who shook out a short bob of black hair that settled neatly and didn't seem rumpled by having a lid pressed on top of it. He turned back to Danio. "I've got a Saturday Night Special in the equipment locker. Do you want to throw it in the passenger compartment, try and say that we were threatened?"

Danio thought for a moment, tapping his fingers on the joystick. "Nah... not worth the bother. We'd only get done for illegal possession, too."

"Thank you for your continued co-operation." The radio buzzed a final message and warning. "Ground Station Pasta, out."

A short distance away, Marco Toni released the pressel from his radio handset and placed it back down on the set. He turned away from the open boot of the car towards Giada, who was still keeping her TAC-15 crossbow trained on the sky just in case Danio decided to spin up his rotors again. Marco paused for a moment as he beheld the cyborg – Giada was no less than _radiant _in the bright daylight, her short blonde hair charged with the sun and shining like a nimbus.

"Very good, Giada," Marco managed eventually, "well-hit and well-done. You can stand down now."

Giada immediately began diassembling her TAC-15, sliding off the arrow bed from the body of the AR-15 rifle on which it was mounted. She nodded her head and said simply, "Thank you, sir."

* * *

The double-doors granting exit from the main lounge led to a short passageway which then opened out to a large open cubic space which was called the hall but was more like a small lobby. A mezzanine ran along the rear and one side of the upper level of the hall, with doors leading off to bedrooms and studies, while a staircase led down the third side. The wall towards the front of the villa had the entrance, above which was a fine set of large bay windows which invited ample natural light. Various accessories and accoutrements that the patrons had dropped in their flight – blackberries, glasses cases, a couple of handbags with their contents kicked to the corners – were scattered across the parquet floor, but otherwise the hallway appeared empty.

The passageway from the lounge had a door on each side of it – one Avise knew to be the kitchen, while the other was an interior room that he had not investigated yet. He was just about to kick the door open when he heard a creak on the stair in the hall.

Avise immediately darted forward to where the passageway opened out into the hall. In the light, he saw dark clothing, a face turning towards him, the flashing steely glint of gunmetal—

The handler swept his arms back and forth in front of him, raking the stairs with sustained fire from his MP5K. The spokes of the banister snapped like matchsticks, and the figure cried out with a high-pitched shriek before toppling to one side, crashing through the weakened banister and splaying out over the floor of the hall.

Avise frowned as the body hit the ground. Something didn't seem right. He paced forward to the body – although he still span around to sweep the barrel of his weapon up across the mezzanine in case anyone else was positioned there – to inspect it more closely. It was a woman – and from her complexion, creased as it was by a final fatal expression of pain, a relatively young one, still in her younger twenties. Her clothes were black, but she was wearing a long, ankle-length skirt as opposed to a suit – she certainly did not give off any impression of being _crew _in the way that the guards he had just fought in the lounge had. In fact...

...she wasn't wearing a suit, or even a dress. It was a uniform. An actual, genuine, traditional maid's uniform.

Avise's eyes widened in alarm and he hissed a sharp inhalation as he processed what this entailed. He hastily reached over the maid's body to snatch up the weapon that he thought she had been carrying. It was with a flood of merciful relief that he saw that it was an actual pistol, recognising it immediately as a Beretta 92FS, the issue handgun to Army officers and something that he had used himself – but. But. The amateur beneath him hadn't even primed a round or taken off the safety.

"Oh _no..._" Avise groaned in frustration, massaging his temple whilst he grimaced at the body beneath him. He could see what had happened. The woman – girl? – was actual domestic staff and had been upstairs preparing rooms for the patrons who might be staying over when it had all kicked off. Naturally panicked by the riot breaking out beneath her, she had found a weapon – one of Giorgio's that he kept under the pillows, something dropped by a guard earlier, Avise couldn't say – and even though she was confused and distressed and fearful and uncomprehending, had fixed on the solid weight of the pistol as an anchor of reassurance to level her with the whatever lay outside. And it had gotten her killed.

"You poor fool." Avise sighed sadly as he cradled the girl's cooling cheek, trying to smooth out the lines on her face, and rubbed the impression of a cross into her forehead with his thumb. "You poor, _stupid _fool!"

Avise flicked his gaze upwards past the ceiling – he wasn't sure himself if it was in question or entreaty – and then back down to the body. After a moment, he came to a decision. The old soldier sighed again, in both regret and resignation. Oh well. No-one had forced the silly girl's actions on her, and he couldn't be responsible for someone else's errors. There was nothing that could be done about it now, except to fix the mistake. Avise took the Beretta pistol, readied it properly and fired several shots into the floor around where he himself had been standing when he'd killed the maid. He then picked up the Beretta's spent casings and flicked them across onto the stairs, before wiping his prints off with a cloth from his pocket and dropping the pistol back down by the body from standing, so that it seemed to scatter across the parquet naturally. To mask things from Giorgio in case he was listening from the lounge, Avise returned to his original position and fired a second burst of shots at the stairs.

There. Now, what had been an ambiguous matter of doubtful information became a clear case of self-defence. That should make things a bit easier for everyone.

Feeling fed up and slightly soiled even though he was certain and unapologetic, Avise gripped his MP5K again and stalked over to the door that he was originally going to break through before this whole incident had intervened. Without pause he fired a burst of shots through the door and then kicked it open roughly.

The room was an interior space without any windows and had utilitarian furniture, chiefly because it was occupied by a large bank of consoles, monitors and laptops along one wall. There was a simple plastic chair (which had been knocked over by Avise's fire), and a man cowering in the corner.

"_Don't hurt me! I surrender! Please!" _The man wailed openly.

"Who are you? _Name!_" Avise barked harshly, stepping into the room and keeping his submachine gun trained on the man.

"Felipo Zuszie!" The man was almost crying. "I'm just the camera technician, I _swear!_"

Avise glanced to one side, taking in the long bank of flickering screens. This must be where they selected the prurient pictures to exhibit for the gathered guests' delectation and edification on the television screens in the lounge. The man might have some intelligence worth on other gladiators and items of surveillance, but Avise had nothing to handcuff him with an in any case didn't want to waste any more time on mooks.

"Stand up!" Avise commanded. "Take a step towards me!"

Slowly and jerkily, Felipo did so. His eyes were wide like saucers, and he dared not blink even though his eyes were burning red.

"Turn around!"

Felipo visibly blanched. "Wh-wh-wh-what are you g-g-gonna do?" He stammered fretfully.

Avise snarled and brandished the MP5K. "Blow your _fucking _head off if you don't start doing as I _fucking _tell you! Now _turn the fuck around!_"

The technician twitched around with a scalded yelp. He trembled on the spot, dreading whatever thing Avise was preparing to inflict upon him. Avise ran over the manoeuvre in his head. Ram the butt into the soft hollow beneath the base of the skull – he'd practised it many times while training as a Prospect before Agapita's arrival, but only ever on dummies. Still, he thought as he raised the MP5K above his head, it seemed simple enough.

Avise slammed the weapon down in a swinging motion, delivering a firm and solid clout to the back of the technician's head. Felipo went down immediately, collapsing onto his knees – but he didn't pass out. Instead, his hand flashed to his head, which he began shaking and screaming loudly and piteously. Avise spat a curse – he wasn't doing very well today, was he? – and clubbed the man again, causing the wails to cut out as suddenly as a switch as he tipped forward onto the carpet, finally rendered unconscious. It should keep him down for an hour.

As the technician's cries stopped ringing around the room, Avise caught another more distant voice snagged onto their fading vibration:

"_Help... I'm over here..."_

_That was Giorgio! _Avise realised the identity of the voice with a shocked start, and then ran back into the lounge. Giorgio was still lying on the floor by the settee, but he was reaching an arm weakly towards two guards who had appeared on the veranda – carrying FN FALs. Avise had noticed Giorgio first – but these guards had first noticed _him._ By the time that Avise had raised his MP5K, the guards were already firing.

With a cry of alarm, Avise stumbled back into the hallway, clumsily grabbing at one of the heavy double-doors and trying to pull it with him to grant him some meagre cover – he was immediately blown onto his back as whole chunks of wood were hammered back out of the door, slamming into the handler like a swinging sack full of rocks.

For a second Avise was stunned – his commands would not be transmitted to his limbs – and so he could only lie there as a voice shouted out, bubbling and bilious with thick, rank, furious choler: "_You're dead, Marchese! Fucking dead!"_

Marchese...? Oh, wait, yeah. Right. That was him, wasn't it? With a De.

Then another voice. A little hoarse and strained, and less violent. "Geez, almost... I'm getting there... okay?"

Sounded like some odious hormonal brat of a teenager sure that she knew it all. Conceited bint.

Then another long, rattling report.

Then silence.

Responsiveness slowly seeped back into Avise's limbs and he rolled onto his side before putting his back against the wall and using it a support to push himself upright. He ached, but no more – he was sure that it was just bruising – and that was good, because if he didn't have any visible injury then he wouldn't have to cause any anguish or worry to—

"—_Agapita!"_

The two guards lay crumpled on the terrace – their body armour not much use against assault rifles at close range – and Agapita was stepping unevenly and unsteadily into the room. On hearing Avise's voice she froze still and her eyes opened wide, staring straight at her handler.

God Almighty and all His choirs of angels and saints in Heaven! The cyborg was a sight to behold. Her clothes were tattered and pretty much falling off of her. She was plastered from head to foot in dirt – you could even see a thin mist of dust trailing behind her movements and settling down through the air. Her front was a muddy brown caked mess of cemented blood and sand, while a smear on her leg incongruously shone a bright ruby, trickling veins of red down to her ankle – tracing crazy, jagged courses around the clods of dirt pasted against her shins. She was listing over onto her right leg and a retrieved FAL hung limply in her hand, three fingers not having yet decided if they wanted to let it slip or not. A massive black bruise was spreading across one side of her face like a drop of dye on tissue paper. And yet, on top of it all, her beret remained perched atop her head like a dainty cherry – even if it was on a burnt cake!

The whole scene looked...

..._just _like Avise once did when being hounded and driven through (and into) the ruts and the potholes all night whilst on a training hike.

Avise laughed – openly, uproariously, fully and happily, sheer pleasure and contentment rippling through his chest.

Agapita looked dismayed. "Oh! I'm so sorry!" She cried anxiously.

"Not at all, not at all!" Avise said brightly. "I just see that no-one can possibly dispute that you gave it your all today."

The cyborg's eyes lit up as though they were halogen bulbs, and obvious glee jabbed the corners of her mouth up to her very ears.

As determined as Agapita had obviously approached her task and as eagerly as she had gobbled up the praise, Avise could see that his cyborg was draining the last dregs of her stamina, scraping the straw around the edge of the can to find the last few films of energy to suck up. The handler motioned towards the settee which Giorgio – now having evidently given up and just lying flat on his back, breathing slowly and regularly – lay beside. "Take a pew, and keep an eye on our esteemed guest there. He's been such a propitious and accommodating host, it's only right and proper that we repay the favour and introduce him to our own hospitality as well. Perhaps you can exchange tips on work ethic, be a good conversationalist?"

Agapita smiled at her handler and stumbled – she was tired and battered, although she didn't want to cause worry to Avise by admitting it unless it was genuinely dangerous – over to the settee, which she heaved down into heavily. After a few seconds to catch her breath, Agapita cranked her neck over to one side.

"_Chevalie _Giorgio? Excuse me... please?" Agapita wheezed.

Giorgio's gaze tracked over silently to the battered, bruised, bloodied and bedraggled form of Agapita. Agapita returned his recognition with a tired, wan smile.

"Next time... you're feeling bored... can't you just... I don't know... take up stamping?"

* * *

(Continued)


	8. Chapter 8

Piera was sitting at her desk in her and Agapita's room and sharpening her throwing knives, which had had some opportunity to be dulled during their excursion to Sardinia the other day. She was scraping the edges keen again with a small whetstone, with a white cloth spread out underneath her to collected the flakes of metal shaved off by the abrasive rock – she treated the spreading speckling of black across the cloth as an indicator of progress. As Piera was testing the weight of one of the knives in her hand, there was a knock at the door. "Come in!" she called out.

It was one of the grown-ups – Priscilla, the blonde. She was carrying a brightly coloured crinkly plastic package in one hand. "Oh, hello Piera. Is Agapita in at all?"

"She hasn't been in all week, miss." Piera explained. _Mercifully_, she added mentally.

Priscilla looked confused. "Yes, but wasn't she discharged from the hospital this morning?"

"That's right," Piera nodded, "but she and Mr. Mancini went straight to another job in Naples." Maybe she'd come back with another dozen bullets in her and Piera would get a second joyous week of undisturbed sleep, too.

"Oh, yes, of course." Priscilla remembered Hilshire telling her about it - the fratello ought to be back tonight. She lifted up the box she was carrying. "Anyway, I've just got a little well-done gift for her here. Could I leave it for her?"

Piera nudged her head to one side. "That's her desk, miss."

Priscilla frowned a little at the cyborg's manner, but flattened it out again. She _was _busy with her work after all, it was understandable. "Okay then." The support agent crossed over to put the box down, ranging a curious eye over Agapita's desk as she did so. Her desk was still largely empty, just having a few textbooks and handbooks, plus a couple of photos of her handler – one posing for a formal picture in dress uniform, while another more natural-looking photo had him in combats examining the chipped and scuffed side of a vehicle in a dry and sandy place that was probably Iraq. Oh well – there was plenty of time for her to make it more personable. Priscilla placed the box back on the desk with another crinkle of its plastic wrapping, but as she did so she noticed a little glint of silver near the bottom of one of the pictures. She narrowed her eyes to inspect it more closely, and found it to be a coin, bearing the image of Enrico de Nicola - first president of the Italian Republic. Priscilla smiled to herself as she recognised one of the markers of the Gladiator Games. Maybe Agapita's personality was starting to blossom - collecting a reflective memento of the mission like that (it never entered Priscilla's head to consider it a bloody trophy). She glanced up to the photo that the marker sat under - it was probably Agapita's version of a medal.

Pleased and reassured with what she had seen, Priscilla gave Piera an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder as she said her goodbyes and left. "Remind Aggie that she won't be getting a present for _every _mission, mind!" Priscilla laughed to Piera as she shut the door behind her.

Piera waited for a second to make sure that the support agent wouldn't be coming back in, and then reached over and used a knife to cut open the packaging and extract the box inside. Flipping it open with the tip of the blade, a pile of small, round chocolates shone in the sudden light. Piera danced her fingers over them for a short moment, before with a dainty, light-fingered flick, popped one up into her mouth.

Blergh. Hazelnut centres. Agapita was welcome to 'em. Piera pushed the box back across to her room-mate's desk. After a second's thought, she closed the box and threw the torn wrapping into a wastepaper bin.

* * *

_"...short matter of time before we can definitively and unequivocally resolve Operation Ivory, and its follow-up Operation Ivory-2, as a complete and final success._

_Pieri Lorenzo_

_Section Two (Special Operations)_

_Chief of Section"_

Lorenzo put down his pen after blotting down his signature, and then leaned back into his chair, exhaling a long, luxuriant, languid sigh of release and relaxation.

It had been a busy week. The diverse magnates, burghers and Captains Of Industry who the Agency had captured had need little inducement to sing; one advantage of dealing with high-grade businessmen is that they knew how to balance odds: when to deal and when to fold. Interviews had not needed to be escalated into interrogations; and by cross-referencing details of co-operative statements, augmented by intelligence from their prior investigations into the 'gladiators', Section One had been able to rapidly assemble profiles on a network of some twenty-eight agents who had scouted candidates for the Gladiator Games – and the Social Welfare Agency had acted quickly to cut that web apart. Fratelli had been charging up and down the length of the country to run the agents to ground. Three had committed suicide rather than endure capture; six had left Italy but under a Europol warrant were picked up by police elsewhere on the continent and delivered to border stations, where fratelli were on-hand to quietly do away with them once the uniformed officers had duly departed with their duty discharged. A further four had surrendered on contact, probably expecting plea-bargaining deals with the threat of airing many embarrassing names in court – not bullets between the eyes in the back of Fiat vans. Two were still at large, having reacted quickly and early to the _high_-_spirited_ game in Sicily and fled to Africa and Asia before the Agency could catch up with them; that did not pose too much of a problem: while they were out of reach, out in the sticks they were also out of power, and in any case Jethro and Monique had been assigned their cases and they would tie off the loose ends before too long.

The remaining dozen agents were accounted for in the Social Welfare Agency's own inimitable style.

Some had felt a stabbing pain lancing across their abdomen on a packed platform in the train station. Others' heads had suddenly jerked as they made to cross the road, and discreetly and obligingly tipped over between parked cars on the side. Some had barricaded themselves into their homes and gone out in one last blaze of glory (or flickering stutter, given the mechanical speed and precision with which cyborgs worked). One had even assembled his client gladiators into a posse and stormed Section One's Sardinian station in Cagliara, unlike his earlier colleagues hoping to negotiate surrender from a position of strength instead of supplication. Several fratelli had to be flown over to contest what proved to be a vicious battle that would have sent the audiences of the Gladiator Games into quivers of exhilaration and paroxysms of rapture. They died hard.

They still died.

It had been a tiring week, but a satisfying one. It was rare that the Agency could genuinely say "job done" – the endless round with Padania just waltzed on and on to misery and infinity – but now here, finally, one sore was scabbed over, one pit was filled in, one tree was planted and blossoming, and the file could flap shut with the firm flat slap of sure finality. The sensation of being _complete_ was one that Lorenzo did not often experience, but Lorenzo could come to appreciate it. You may live with the din of the city ringing around you at all times – you may even adapt to it, become accustomed to it, the sound whirling through you like a draught through a hole; when that hole was filled, and the noise cut off, it was weird, unreal, dislocating, suddenly cast off without reference – alarming, but new, exciting, and actually, rather good.

Furthermore, Lorenzo could take some luxury to ease his journey into this new sensation as well. The past week, maintaining a high operational tempo undimmed throughout multiple engagements - a speed that would have baffled the most ardent and fittest special forces units - surely also showed the Agency at its best. It would quiet detractors in the Cabinet, and cow enemies elsewhere.

Lorenzo permitted himself to hum a little formless ditty to himself as he stretched back into his executive chair. Things were going well!

Then Jean Croce walked in.

With a file.

Oh, God.

"Chief, could I have a moment?" He sounded... consternated.

Lorenzo flapped his chair back up to upright. "Yes, Mr. Croce, what is it?"

"It's about our orders."

"What about them?"

"Well..." Jean bit his lip nervously. "...there aren't any." It sounded stupid saying it, and Jean felt foolish for doing so. Of course there were daily standing orders, but as diligently as he inspected the board nothing particular had been pinned up. He was fearful of making an idiot of himself in front of the Chief, not being able to see in front of his own nose and find something obvious and prominent.

Jean felt like even more of a fool when Lorenzo's response was to _nod_. "That's right, Mr. Croce, no missions are planned so no preparation need be scheduled. We are currently in a reorganisation and recuperation period following the successful conclusion of Ivory-2."

"I understood that Section Two would be providing security for the Finance Guard as they begin dismantling the guilty parties' assets."

Lorenzo paused for a moment, and then very deliberately forward in his seat to put his elbows on the desk and steeple his fingers. "Why do you think that we would be doing such a thing, Mr. Croce?"

Jean paused himself, considering whether he really wanted to make an issue out of this. He decided that he did. "Sir, umpteen dozen counts of Conspiracy To Murder would be a start."

Lorenzo sighed, smiled indulgently (patronisingly?), and shook his head. "Mr. Croce, your dedication to the principle of law is admirable – but there's the alternative principle of public order and societal wellbeing. The 'patrons' of the former Gladiator Games have a combined wealth entering into the billions of euros. To publicly arrest them would fatally undermine confidence in our industry – not to mention cause international scandals with the foreigners amongst them – induce wider failures in business elsewhere and cause job losses for both the rich _and _poor. The only people who'd benefit from it would be editorialising journalists."

Towards the end of Lorenzo's explanation Jean's eyes began to wander as he tuned out the words that he expected to hear. When it looked as though the Chief had finished, he continued as he meant to go on. "You can't expect them to just breeze along as they were with no more than a slap on the wrist – it's not even a deterrent. The _ringleader _of the _circus_ is even getting to keep his knighthood!"

"The President awards honours on the advice of the Prime Minister - naturally his judgement can't be brought into public question." Lorenzo sighed. "In any case, they're being stung by more than a slap, Mr. Croce." Lorenzo explained, patiently, for someone not so quick on the uptake, and glossing over his subordinate's rather overly casual manner. "In addition to their intelligence contributions we persuaded all present to express their natural philanthropy and _noblesse oblige_ in order to make _sizeable charitable donations_ to the Social Welfare Agency's ongoing efforts to restore quality of life to those stunted in their growth by tragedy. It should fund our operating costs and take the edge off of our budget concerns for quite a while."

"Blood money!" Jean almost spat. "Why should they get off easy? They're perpetrated crimes as much as anyone else that we've fought. Why are we suddenly equivocating? We live in a republic, not some feudal mud-pit! Since when were they beyond the law?"

"None of them are Padanians." Lorenzo sighed wearily.

"It's aiding and abetting!" Jean would not let it go.

"We've eliminated a criminal ring, robbed Padania of a high-level source of recruitment, wrung out some intelligence on Mafia operations in the south, secured the Agency's financial future and allowed one of the girls to become experienced." Lorenzo enumerated the bounty. "That's enough."

Jean pressed his lips together tightly. "I understand that Section One's Number Three in Cagliari died from his wounds shortly after the rescue. And then there's Adele Velice, lest we forget. Two Agency staff, _murdered_. What will you say to them, _sir?_"

"Between both Ivories some _fifty_ assorted villains have met their end." Lorenzo fixed the impudent handler with a hard stare, quitely seething at Jean's sheer blinded arrogance to try to arrogate the guilt dead to his own purposes. "That. Is. _Plenty_."

Jean scowled. "Sir, is that _your _evaluation, or the _party line?_"

The gunshot exploded in Jean's ear. He instinctively ducked, teeth grinding for a way to defend himself, pawing at his hip for a weapon that wasn't there – and then realised that the report had actually been Lorenzo's hand slamming against his desk. He was standing out of his chair – and his face was knotted like a storm and black like thunder.

"By God!" Lorenzo roared. "You deviant little swine. You're _too damn familiar_, Mister Jean Croce!"

Jean took a step back instinctively, alarm trembling his features. He had never seen the Chief like this before.

"You have been given_ one_ cyborg to use and abuse as you wish, Mr. Croce!" Lorenzo was still shouting. "You do _not _have this entire Agency at your casual beck and call! We are not your tool, and I am not your bureaucratic adjutant to do the filing and stamping incurred by your tromping walkabouts! If you ever _dare _presume to intrude upon my station again then you will have a _damn sight more_ than my _mere_ displeasure to contend with!"

Lorenzo had delivered the entire tirade with the furious intensity of undammed fury, battering Jean with a white flood of loud anger.

"_Is that understood?"_

"…yes sir." Was all Jean could manage, still reeling from the gale.

"Then _**GET OUT**_!"

Jean fled.

Lorenzo exhaled slowly and then gently lowered himself back into his chair. Such an outburst was unlike him, but it was fulfilling to let loose with it. He was known being cold, stern, austere and withdrawn in temperament, but it did well to remind his charges from time to time that the full gamut of emotion was not denied to him – when he assumed his usual collected persona, it would make that controlled calm even more effective at cowing those reprobates. How could they tell when he'd choose to allow them to erode his patience again? Nastiness was held there, concealed up his sleeve like a switchblade - invisible, anonymous, unknown - but lashing out in an instant to the unwary.

The Chief smiled to himself, and poured himself a sherry from the bureau before continuing with his paperwork.

* * *

There was a knock at the door of Belisario's office. Four quick raps – that usually meant that it was Donato.

Belisario closed the game of Minesweeper that he'd been playing as he called out, "'Sopen!"

It was actually Bianchi who walked in, carrying a file. He raised his eyebrows at Belisario's confused look. "You seem surprised to see me, Belisario."

The Agency conditioner didn't use his techniques on himself – which might say something about their nature – and so was caught flat-footed. "Oh, er, it's just the door..." he mumbled.

Bianchi lit up with visible delight. "Oh, you mean the knocking? I change it every so often – keeps people on their toes." He seemed inordinately pleased that his little trick had worked.

_Always head-games_! Belisario regained his composure by dismissing it as inconsequential. "Anyway, is anything the matter?"

"Actually, there might be." Bianchi's expression appeared more set and serious as he opened the file that he was carrying. "I have the after-action reports here for the first Ivory operation."

"Well, what about them?" Belisario didn't know where Bianchi was leading.

"I have Avise Mancini's narrative here." Belisario licked his fingers and flipped through the papers in the file before pulling out one particular sheet. "Something came up which seemed... irregular. I've marked it."

Belisario scanned the page of dense text until he met a couple of lines picked out with orange highlighter. He read aloud, _"Agapita remarked that killing the gladiator 'felt great'. This caused some discomfiture amongst the patrons..." _He looked back up at Bianchi.

"Well, you can see why I might be 'discomfited' myself." Bianchi frowned at Belisario's questioning look. "Why is a cyborg exhibiting such tendencies?"

"Hasn't she told you this herself in your psych sessions?" Belisario shifted his position in his chair, making it squeak.

"Yes, but if I'm going to respond to it I'd like to determine its point of origin." Bianchi pressed.

Belisario twisted the side of his mouth into a frown. He really didn't appreciate Bianchi's questioning – it felt like a jab at his professional competency, and if not then he would have thought that the resident psychologist would have known to phrase his request more tactfully. Belisario stood up out of his chair with a sigh and traced a finger along one of the dense shelves above his workstation until he pulled down a green-coloured box file marked "XB12-04". He opened in and a concertina of spreadsheets bounced out like a jack-in-the-box. Belisario picked through them until he retrieved a sheet of his own, handing Bianchi a series of jagged-looking graphs.

Bianchi furrowed his brow at the squiggles and zig-zags. "I... don't understand this."

Belisario smiled inwardly, unable to resist a bit of intellectual posturing – even if the adult portion of his brain admonished him for being petty and puerile, it was hard to shake off university drinking-circle tribalism that told him that psychology was a nonsense subject, on the lines of Media Studies, or Physics. "They're traces of dopamine levels," he explained, "the peaks coincide with periods of violence."

"Fighting is pleasurable to her?" Bianchi frowned. "Why would you do something like that?"

"If Agapita was a first-generation cyborg then she would approach combat in a clinical and neutral way, true, but the second generation was predicated on less direct control and greater emotional integrity – obedience through inducement, rather than command. It's a stage in the process for widening conditioning's scope to the general public—"

"I know all this, Belisario." Bianchi shook his head irritably.

"—and if we can't override emotions, as with the first generation, we _finesse _them to avoid mental traumas instead." Belisario continued smoothly. "The old Maria Machiavelli enjoyed mischief – really, we've just adapted that for Agapita."

Bianchi seemed baffled. "You mean that we have a cyborg who _gets off _on killing?"

Belisario rolled his eyes dismissively. "What is it with psychologists and sex? I thought that Freud was meant to be old hat nowadays. In any case, no, nothing even nearly so extreme. She just finds it... _satisfying,_ that would be the term."

Bianchi blinked and peered closely at the sheet of graphs in his hands again, as if he could elucidate some hidden truth within them that the conditioner had missed. Belisario guffawed. "Chin up, Doctor, if none of us had neuroses you wouldn't have any work!"

* * *

Defence Minister Monica Petris sat in her office in the Palazzo Baracchini, the headquarters of Italy's Ministry of Defence atop the Quirinal Hill of Rome: that august station from which had looked out Popes, Kings, and lately presidents. She had just dismissed her permanent undersecretary who had been briefing her on the parliamentary questions due to take place that afternoon at the Chamber of Deputies in the Palazzo Montecitorio; there was still a good twenty minutes or so before the ministerial limousine would be ready, so she filled the gap in her schedule by reading over again the report on Operation Ivory that had been copied over from the Social Welfare Agency.

_Five hundred and one kills to inflict for her to post her first profit. _

Petris looked out of the office window – made of thickened plastic composites, not glass, to confound snipers – and out over the roofs of Field of Mars, colours dull like bare soil thrown up by a bombardment, to the snaking scales of the Tiber and beyond that the dreaming domes of the Vatican, round like celestial spheres, bubbles of infinity on the cusp of being released into the cosmos. A vision of war, and a vision of peace – and between them the snaring twisting of the serpent which put things not necessarily in that order.

_Well, little miss – four hundred and eighty-eight to go.

* * *

_

Agapita shivered slightly, although not with the cold; after several days on a hospital trolley (it should have been fewer, but some of her operations were put back when other cyborgs had come in damaged from the week's fighting) it was a genuine delight to feel the light of the sun again – the light and loose short-sleeved white chemise and short black skirt that she was wearing let it warm every part of her.

She swung her legs underneath the table, taking pleasure in the movement – movement which didn't need to be timed and regulated like her training sessions! – and looked about her again. The location, at a waterfront café and restaurant, wasn't entirely ideal – the clanking of stays and halyards against masts and the snapping of burgees was a little distracting and would make it more difficult to discern the origin point of any incoming fire – but the pleasant espresso that she and her handler were drinking was some consolation.

As she continued to swing her legs, her foot hit Avise's shin next to her, causing him to spasm. Agapita's face immediately fell. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" She gasped.

"No matter, Agapita," Avise grunted, rubbing the bruise with his other leg, "we'll save the apologies for when you break something." To try and stop her brooding blackly on inconveniencing her handler, Avise thought of a different topic.

"I've not seen you wearing something like that before." Avise said conversationally, looking over her clothes. "It suits you." Rather flattering as well, if he had to say so. "Trying to show off your unblemished body again?"

"I'm just glad to be rid of the marks," Agapita explained, "they weren't really the sort of injuries that I wanted."

"Eh?" Avise didn't know what her cyborg was pressing at.

"For my first wounding," Agapita continued. "being hit by a bullet is nothing special. There needed to be more... more _occasion_. It felt like it should be special. Vanessa was chasing down some runners to a marina pontoon, and she got _speared _by a _harpoon_ in _midair_ when she was _jumping_ onto their _speedboat_." Agapita emphasised each beat of the bloody blow as though they were setting down great weighty buttresses supporting some grand edifice, the hole torn by the wound the passage through some monumental victory arch gracing the streets of Rome.

"Harpoon..." Avise mused. "Are you implying that Vanessa looks like a whale?"

Agapita's face flushed crimson with shame. "No!" She was horrified. "That would be cruel!"

"Do you mean that it would be _false_, or are you being tactful and just trying spare Vanessa her blushes?" Avise chuckled while his cyborg fretted.

"Are we going to fight again here?" Agapita asked, trying to escape her own embarassment.

"Agapita, you are _not _to go finding excuses to get yourself hurt!" Avise growled, suddenly stern. "If you want to get tossed off an elephant's tusks and then have to fight your way out of the digestive tract of a... a _hippo_, you will not do it on the Agency's dime. Think of the poor souls who spend their lives in fear of _just _getting shot, and be grateful!" Avise scratched at his right arm unconsciously.

"Yes, sir." Agapita was glum. "It's just that everyone was working so hard this past week, I want to show that I'm contributing."

Trying to boast over rivals, or fit in with friends? It was an ambiguous statement. "Don't worry, you did great at Agrigento. It's nothing to sneer at," Avise reassured his cyborg, "thirteen kills is quite substantial – you achieved more in one day than even Triela manages in a month."

"Most months." Agapita pouted.

"Agapita, dearest, I didn't even manage that many in about sixteen years of soldiering." After a second's hesitation – _she killed more people in an afternoon than I did in sixteen years! - _Avise reached over and gave Agapita's hand a reassuring squeeze of the hand. "You're doing absolutely fine." Well, even though they weren't direct kills he _did_ run the Dardo over that pick-up truck in Managaban. There had probably been six or eight Mahdists in that, it probably bumped his own score up a bit.

The idea of actively outpacing her handler, the one who was supposed to be her guide, mentor, ideal and exemplar, gave Agapita some pause for thought. She felt a little guilty, as though it was an indiscretion or usurpation, and abandoned her protest. She looked over to her handler, her smile nervous but honest and her eyes open with appreciation, and showed that she recognised his gift and reward by taking a sip of her espresso.

She only lapped at it lightly – the cup was tiny, after all – but it was less a miserly desire to eke out the cost of the drink, and more from a simple wish to savour its flavour. Such a small amount of fluid couldn't burn, and so she played it forward and backward over her tongue until a thin skein reached over to the farthest edges of her tongue and achieved the fullest spread of taste. As it percolated down through the buds on her tongue, a new question formed inside of her.

"Sir, if we're not here to fight, why have we come?"

"Speak of the Devil," Avise remarked, his eyes tracking over to the esplanade. "Here he comes now. Now, game face off, Agapita, this isn't an operation here."

A middle-aged man, somewhat portly and gone to seed, crossed into seating area. "Hello," Mario Bossi said, affecting a cheery demeanour as he approached the table, "mind if I sit down?"

* * *

**THE END**


End file.
